The first ISKO UK Annual General Meeting took place on 5th March. We are delighted to announce that Jean Aitchison and Prof. Brian Vickery were elected as Honorary Members of ISKO UK. Jean and Brian are both pioneers whose work has become the foundations of the knowledge organization field.

We would like to invite you to the first 2008 open meeting of the British Chapter of International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) on 5th March entitled Confronting the Future: Organizing and Managing Knowledge in the Web 2.0 age.

Two distinguished speakers will give their views on where the new shift in disintermediation brought by Web 2.0 and related changes in information technologies are leading our profession.

Paul Dodgson is Vice-Chair of the Records Management Society of Great Britain and will describe where he sees the increasingly important Records Management function going in the coming years.

Peter Griffiths is CILIP Vice-President 2008 and has enjoyed a long career in government libraries. Peter will tell us how this heterogeneous professional body sees the future for librarians and information scientists in both the public and private sectors.

This ISKO UK event is organized in cooperation with the UCL’s School of Library, Archive and Information Studies.
For full details on the venue, programme and to book your place go to the event's website .

ISKOUK held its second KOKO (KOnnecting KOmmunities) event from 14:00 - 20:00 on November 5th entitled Ranganathan Revisited: Facets for the future . The intention was to explore the current status of faceted classification from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. The event was sponsored by Factiva from Dow Jones and the venue was provided by the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London (UCL). Eighty-one people attended.
Presentations (pdf) and recordings (mp3) are available on the event website.
Read a report on the event by Bob Bater.

The next ISKO UK KOnnect KOmmunities event entitled "Ranganathan revisted: Facets for the Future" will be held on 5th November 2007, at University College London.

S. R. Ranganathan was the Indian librarian and academic who, in the 1930s, developed the theory of faceted classification. Faceted classification is an approach to presenting and organizing knowledge based on the identification of fundamental subject categories (‘facets’) that allows the combination of relevant values from one or more facets to define a compound subject with great precision.

At ISKO UK’s KOKO event on November 5th, theory and practice will be juxtaposed in a stimulating rapprochement long overdue. Speakers from academia will ask whether faceted classification is not in fact, the paradigm for effective retrieval and discovery of knowledge, and will examine the relative merits of a number of different approaches. Independent software developers, Jan Wyllie and Simon Eaton, will talk about and demonstrate faceted classification as an intelligence analysis tool. Factiva, market leaders in business information provision, will demonstrate how faceted classification combined with visualization and user interaction lies behind their award-winning information services. Netherlands-based company Aduna will present their open-source facet-driven enterprise search solution AutoFocus, followed by an opportunity for speakers and attendees to mingle in a networking session supplemented by wine and nibbles provided courtesy of Factiva.

ISKO UK KOKO events are free for all to attend. To view the programme and book online please click here.

For this event, we extend our thanks to Factiva for their sponsorship, and to UCL’s School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, for providing the venue.

KOnnect is a shared blog offering facilities for anyone concerned practically or theoretically with any aspect of knowledge organization, to contribute to the exploration of topics of common interest such as: metadata taxonomies, classifications, thesauri, ontologies, information integration interoperability and discovery, content management, records management etc. KOnnect is sponsored and managed by ISKO UK and is established and maintained by Bob Bater. While the ISKO UK blog will continue to function as an observatory for events, projects and resources in knowledge organization, KOnnect will be focused on engaging information professionals in more topic-orientated discussions.

ISKO UK invites you to a half-day seminar "Tools for Knowledge Organization Today" to be held on 4th September 2007, in London. The event, organized in cooperation with School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, focuses on current developments in knowledge organization systems and the work of groups in the knowledge organization field. The programme will include presentations on the new standard for structured vocabularies (BS 8723) and a metadata generation project. Attendance is free. More information on programme and bookings can be found on the events web page.

ISKO 2008 — Montréal. Call for Papers is OPEN. The 10th biennial ISKO Conference "Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organization Official" will be held 5-8 August 2008, at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada). Abstract submission deadline 9 November 2007. Read more here.

The first North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization took place at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, on 14-15 June 2007. There were forty participants. Researchers contributed papers and posters, and delivered presentations over 2 days. The group resolved to form a North American chapter of ISKO, and are moving forward with that plan. Papers are available in the dLIST archive. Pictures from this event are available here .

A new issue of Knowledge Organization journal is now out: 33 (2006) No.4 [see table of content]. The editor in chief Richard Smiraglia announces: "... I would like to announce the impeding shift of Knowledge Organization to an online mode of publication. Beginning with the next volume subscribers may choose KO in paper or in electronic form or both. For registered subscribers the pdf versions will be available for download from the Ergon webspace. ISKO members will receive the paper version plus, on individual request, the pdf-versions without extra charge by registering for this service. The service will include volumes 27(2000) forward. Contributing authors will be provided, on request with pdf versions of their articles that they may use for their own scientific and scholarly purpose; copyright will of course remain with Ergon Verlag."

Call for Nominations for the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award and the UKeiG Jason Farradane Award. UKeiG is now seeking nominations for these two prestigious awards, presented annually at the November Online information Meeting in London. Both awards are sponsored by Sage Publications and both honour achievement in the broad field of information management.
The UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award is presented for an outstanding contribution to the narrower field of information retrieval, while the UKeiG Jason Farradane Award recognises brilliant work in information science. The deadline for both awards is Friday 14th September 2007. Details of the individual awards together with the addresses to which nominations should be sent are given here.

The first in a series of ISKO UK Connecting Communities meetings entitled "Content, knowledge, information: Same Difference? " was held yesterday at University College London.
Connecting Communities events are designed to be opportunities for professionals with similar interests and experiences to hold conversations and to share interests and experience in an informal setting.

Karen Spärck Jones passes away (4 April 2007). Karen Spärck Jones was professor emeritus of computers and information at the University of Cambridge. She is most known for her work in automatic language and information processing research. Professor Spärck Jones was a Fellow of the British Academy, an AAAI Fellow and ECCAI Fellow. She received seven awards for her research including, in 2004, the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2007, the BCS Lovelace Medal and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award. She was the second recipient of ACM SIGIR's Gerard Salton Award.

"...She made outstanding theoretical contributions to information retrieval and natural language processing and built upon this theoretical framework through numerous experiments. Her work is among the most highly cited in the field and has influenced a whole generation of researchers and practitioners..." (announcement from Cambridge University)

"Spärck Jones's research was always widely appreciated within her research community, but with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the early 1990s it gained hugely in prominence. Her deep knowledge of information retrieval and natural language processing, combined with a collegial leadership, enabled her to play a leading international role." (The Independent Thursday 12 April, 2007, pp. 40.)

Alan Gilchrist kicks off events programme for new information group ISKO UK. The newly formed British chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization was pleased to welcome members and potential members to its inaugural meeting on 26 March 2007, at which Alan Gilchrist gave an informal talk entitled “If it rained knowledge"… See PRESS RELEASE.

At the business part of the meeting, the chapter representatives were elected. For more details click here.

A new issue of the Knowledge organization journal: Vol. 33(2006) No 3 has been distributed.

Members of the British chapter of ISKO (ISKO UK) are now working towards shaping our agenda within the wider scope of ISKO, and will aim to cooperate closely with a number of organizations and fora that are active in the fields of information and knowledge organization, subject access to information, controlled vocabularies and information discovery and retrieval.
By joining ISKO UK, you may find a wider national and international platform for sharing and disseminating your own or your community's knowledge organization skills, practice and research.