It is thirty years since the Information Systems Teaching in Practice first seminar, I think.  The destruction of my archives has meant that I have no records.  Most of the meetings took place at Hatfield, but some I think at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale.  If anyone has any of these, it would be good to know.

The things I learned involved controlled vocabularies, such as thesaurus and classification, were unknown to people who came from a computing background, and for a long time I found students couldn't distinguish correctly a broader narrower from a parent child. Indeed finding popular computing books now which write of parent child when the concept is clearly not understood, and they actually need broader narrower,  is worth a catalogue record in its own right.

I still find books teaching some sort of computing method which use as a case a library, and don't understand a comma delimited file.   Which wont work in a library catalogue record.

There is something useful in decades, as we have ten fingers, and with Arabic numberals, the 0 idea.  Everyone has to understand (how do you under stand, is this standing under, in which case under what, or standing under a standing) that things don't actually happen in decades, or centuaries, but these are broader and narrower terms in a thesaurus which may be mapped onto terms as approximate delimiters for fields, and which vary in their semantics and meanings, and that these need to be mapped into indexes for thesauruses and classification schemes.  

We might call this join Information Systems / Knowledge Organisation and thus ISKO.

This field goes beyond a particular library and its management or information system, or catalogue, but cannot then go into a subject, as that has already its institutional patch.  The arts and humanities, which said it had too much information, (at Senate House) which begat TMISH and hence #TMISH is the most recent case in point.


John Lindsay
Reader in Information Systems Design
Kingston University,
Kingston Upon Thames,
London.
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