Taxonomies in Information Science

Taxonomists are often asked about the work they do. For those outside the world of information science and management, it can be hard to get their head around classification and the science of taxonomy. To put it at its simplest — taxonomy is a knowledge organization system, usually for a specific subject area. This interesting…

Read More

Data Governance At Play

There is a lot of discussion happening about data governance these days. Data governance is the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of data used in an enterprise. A sound data governance program includes a governing body or council, a defined set of procedures and a plan to execute those procedures. In order to get…

Read More

The Future of Libraries

There has been much speculation over the past few decades as technology evolves and reality-changing technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and well, e-readers, have found their place in life and libraries. Many believe the value of libraries have been lost on a new generation that wants the information they need at their fingertips instantaneously…

Read More

Mastering the Subjects

Creating a taxonomy often begins with input from subject matter experts (SMEs) and by evaluating other taxonomies or thesauri already being used in the subject domain. An SME might be a software engineer, a help desk support operative, an accounts manager, a scientific researcher –  anybody with in-depth knowledge of the subject you are attempting…

Read More

1776 Was A Leap Year

The United States will celebrate its Independence Day –  July 4th – this week. Fireworks, parades, cookouts, music–the typical content of a 4th of July celebration. It’s a time when many people relax, have fun, and wave the American flag. But who stops to think about what the 4th of July means? Sure, we learned in middle school…

Read More

Relationships: The Good, the Bad, and the Analyzed?

Relationships can be challenging at best. Relationships with family, friends and people in general contain facets and dynamics that are evolving and often contentious. When it comes to data content, relationships are just as important and just as volatile. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a natural language processing technique that analyzes relationships between a set of documents and…

Read More

Happy Father’s Day

We celebrated Father’s Day yesterday, so it felt appropriate to share an article written several years ago for this blog about the “father of library science” – Shiyali Ramamrita (S. R.) Ranganathan. As described in the Wikipedia article about him, Ranganathan “is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the…

Read More