History of knowledge organisation at UCL
This page contains a history of knowledge organisation at UCL.
By Prof. Vanda Broughton
William Charles Berwick Sayers 1881-1960
When the School of Librarianship opened at UCL in 1919 one of its required courses was classification, and it has remained on the curriculum in one form or another ever since. The course was taught by William Charles Berwick Sayers, then the leading exponent of classification in Great Britain. Like almost all of the Library School Staff Berwick Sayers had a separate professional life, where he had proved exceptional. He was the Chief Librarian at Croydon Public Library, and during his time there improved and extended the provision to include a service to children and the creation of an arts centre in every library, as well as setting up libraries in schools and hospitals. He served as an officer of the Library Assistants’ Association at a crucial stage in its development, and in 1938 he was President of the Library Association.
But, as Ollé says, “his work as a practising librarian, though well above average, and in its day outstanding in the provision of library services for children, was eclipsed by his success as a writer and teacher of librarianship, particularly in the field of library classification”.
Sayers’ Canons of Library Classification arose as a set of criteria he developed to asses James Duff Brown’s Subject Classification in 1906, and which he later applied to all the major classification schemes. They were first published in the Library Association Record in 1907, and thereafter “Sayers was regarded as an oracle on library classification”. His book, an Introduction to Library Classification was described by H. E. Bliss as “the most esteemed British textbook on the subject”, and it was used widely in the British Isles and overseas. Its successor, A Manual of Classification for Librarians & Bibliographers, was the standard work in British library schools for many decades, and his work at UCL was instrumental in its success (Ollé 1981, 241)
But almost everyone in the library profession knew Sayers’s books on library classification. They were successful not only because Sayers could write but because he could teach. In 1919 he became visiting lecturer in library classification at the newly founded School of Librarianship at London University, and remained so for many years. His textbooks on classification were shaped and refined by his teaching at this school.
Sayers’ most illustrious student was of course S. R. Ranganathan à who came to the School in 1924. Of him Ranganathan said he was “the first person to build up an elaborate, consistent and fairly complete grammar of the classificatory language”, although it must be allowed that Sayers’ skills were as an analyst and expositor of the discipline rather than a great innovator in which role Ranganathan surpassed him.
In 1960 the Classification Research Group à agreed to honour Sayers by the publication of a festschrift on his eightieth birthday. Unfortunately he did not live to see it published by the Library Association, in 1961, as The Sayers Memorial Volume. Many leading classificationists of the time, contributed including Foskett, Farradane, Vickery à and Ranganathan à.
Foskett, D. J. and B.I. Palmer (Eds.). 1961. The Sayers Memorial Volume: Essays in Librarianship in Memory of William Charles Berwick Sayers. London: Library Association for the Classification Research Group.
Munford, W. A. 1976. A History of The Library Association, 1877-1977. London: The Library Association.
Ollé, James G. 1981. “W.C. Berwick Sayers, librarian and teacher”. Journal of Librarianship, 13(4): 232-247.
Ranganathan, S.R. 1961. “Sayers and Donker Duyvis: Theory and Manner of Library Classification”. Annals of Library Science, 8(3): 85-99.
Sayers, W. C. B.
1912. The Grammar of Classification, Croydon, Central Library.
1915. Canons of Classification, London: Grafton.
1935. An Introduction to Library Classification, London, Grafton & Co.
1944. A Manual of Classification for Librarians & Bibliographers. 2nd ed. London: Grafton & Co.
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan 1892-1972
S. R. Ranganathan is the UCL Department’s most famous alumnus, and the one who has had most influence on the wider world of information. An academic mathematician, he was appointed as University Librarian at Madras in 1924. Despite his research background he had no experience of library work, and later that year he travelled to Britain to learn about current best professional practice.
After a brief unprofitable period at the British Museum Library he enrolled at the newly established School of Librarianship where he did not intend to study for a qualification, but took several courses in the subjects he was interested in. W. C. Berwick Sayers à became an unofficial mentor and much of Ranganathan’s time was spent out in the world of practice. He seemed to enjoy his time in London, lodging first in Gower Street and then with a group of Indian friends in Maida Vale where their landlady learned to cook Indian dishes for them. He did tolerably well in his studies, but his thoughts became absorbed in the problems of the theory of classification, at that time beginning to be addressed by a few theorists such as Paul Otlet, H. E. Bliss and James Duff Brown.
Ranganathan’s approach was fundamentally different from his predecessors who almost without exception came from a literary or liberal arts background, and who did not share his analytical methods. In later life it was often suggested that his Hindu background and his less than perfect English were the reasons why his ideas were difficult to understand, but they were not – it was the scientific education that others lacked that was the barrier. Very early in his time in London he had begun to look at the application of mathematics to classification, and the legend has it that he saw the engineering toy Meccano and was inspired by the idea of constructing a complex system from small individual components. The timeline and the chain of influence are difficult to untangle, but it seems likely that the concept of faceted classification was devised in this early period. It would become the dominant theory of knowledge organization in the twentieth through to the twenty-first century (Hjørland 2013) and has been incorporated into every area of information organization and retrieval including the internet. Ranganathan’s ideas were followed enthusiastically by the Classification Research Group à under the leadership of Brian Vickery à, leading to a distinctive British tradition of facet analysis, which has been no less influential on classification work in the Department, particularly on the Universal Decimal Classification under the editorship of Ia McIlwaine à, and the Second edition of Bliss’s Bibliographic Classification edited by Mills and Broughton à.
Ranganthan’s impact on library and information science was of course much wider than this. He was an exceptionally prolific writer, and wrote not only about classification and information retrieval, but also about documentation, cataloguing, bibliographic control, standardization, information exchange, knowledge representation through coding of subject content, and the intellectual foundations of library science. He was a major player on the international stage, and travelled widely, working in Zurich for several years while he served on various international bodies including IFLA and FID. In 1950 he was invited to the Rockefeller Foundation with the hope that he would collaborate on a project to develop an international language of communication and exchange based on mathematics rather than natural language.
Ranganathan’s own Colon Classification evolved through several editions and continues to be worked on at the Documentation Research and Training Centre which he founded in Bangalore. The concept is now much more sophisticated and shows the increasing use of mathematics in classification. Ranganathan himself said, speaking at the International Study Conference in 1967 that:
abstract classification will make better progress if it marches hand in hand with mathematics. Library classification is essentially a problem in mapping or transformation. It maps a multi-dimensional space on a uni-dimensional one. It transforms a pattern of n dimensions into a pattern of one dimension. … An alliance of mathematics and abstract classification will, I am sure, lead to mutual enrichment ….
Hjørland, B. 2013. “Facet Analysis: the Logical Approach to Knowledge Organization”. Information Processing and Management, 49(2): 545-557.
Kumar, G. 1992. S. R. Ranganathan: an Intellectual Biography. New Delhi: Har-Anand.
Raghavan, K. S. 2019. “Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan”. In ISKO Encyclopaedia of Knowledge Organization, edited by Birger Hjorland and Claudio Gnoli.
1934 Classified Catalogue Code
1937 Prolegomena to Library Classification
1938 Theory of the Library Catalogue
1945 Elements of Library Classification
1948 Classification and International Documentation
1951 Classification and Communication
1955 Headings and Canons
1957. “Library Classification as a Discipline”. In Proceedings of the International Study Conference on Classification for Information Retrieval. London: Aslib, 3-12.
Brian Campbell Vickery 1918-2009
Brian Campbell Vickery was Professor and Director of the School of Library and Archive Studies at UCL from 1973-1983. He was primarily an information scientist and classification researcher. His academic education was in chemistry and he was employed in various scientific and technical libraries at the start of his career. In 1960 he became principal scientific officer at the UK National Lending Library for Science and Technology, before taking up a post at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. From 1966 to 1973 he was research director at Aslib in London.
His interest in scientific documentation led to his attending the Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information in London in 1948. As a result he was asked to convene a small group of information specialists to investigate the problems of disseminating scientific knowledge. This group became the Classification Research Group à, one of the most influential and important research collaborations in the field of information organization and retrieval in the twentieth century. It was permeated by the ideas of S. R. Ranganathan à which it developed into a distinctive British tradition of facet analysis.
Vickery himself was the most energetic and prolific writer and researcher among the CRG members, having published over 150 books and articles. In the literature of facet analysis he is the second most cited author after Ranganathan himself, and most western students of classification will have learned their facet analysis from the works of B. C. Vickery, which are in many ways more accessible than, for example, the Prolegomena. He was also instrumental in establishing the methodology for constructing a faceted system which remains a standard procedure today. His most influential books are Faceted Classification (1960, 1966) and Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987, 1982, 2004), and one particularly important paper was “Structure and function in retrieval languages” published in Journal of Documentation 1971 and selected as one of the most influential articles in the first six decades of that journal (Gilchrist 2019).
In the early years Vickery’s emphasis was very much on “classification for information retrieval” (rather than for physical organization), and as time passed his focus moved more towards information science and retrieval theory with a technical slant. He continued to research and to publish well into his retirement, maintaining a lively website full of innovative ideas. A memorable event was his address to the fairly newly formed ISKO UK à at UCL in 2008
Gilchrist, Alan. 2019. “Brian C. Vickery”. In ISKO Encyclopaedia of Knowledge Organization, edited by Birger Hjorland and Claudio Gnoli.
Vickery, Brian C. 1960. Faceted Classification. A Guide to Construction and Use of Special Schemes. Prepared for the Classification Research Group. London: Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux.
Vickery, Brian C. 2004. A Long Search For Information, Graduate School of LIS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Occasional papers, 213.
Vickery, Brian C and Alina Vickery. 1987. Information Science in Theory and Practice. London: Butterworths. (2nd ed. 1992; 3rd ed. 2004)
Classification Research Group
The United Kingdom Classification Research Group was an influential working group with an agenda to investigate the problems of the management of scientific information and the role played by classification in that process. It arose as a consequence of the Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information held in London in 1948, one of the themes of which was the relatively poor dissemination of good quality research and the political implications. A committee was formed under the leadership of the physicist J. D. Bernal, but after two years little progress had been made, and Brian Vickery à and Jack Wells were asked if a group of professional librarians and information scientists might do better.
The Group first met in 1952 and consisted of the leading exponents of classification in the UK, some practitioners and some academics. They were all enthusiastic followers of the theories of S. R. Ranganathan à and in 1955 a manifesto was published in the Library Association Record: “to make faceted classification the basis of all forms of information retrieval”.
Not all of the Group were associated with UCL other than being part of the same close knit research constituency, but Vickery à was a founder member, and later Broughton à and McIlwaine à were regular attenders. However the School of Librarianship provided a home, meeting space, and office services for a number of years until the Group’s eventual demise in the early 2000s. The School was also heavily involved in the organization of two important conferences, the 1957 International Study Conference on Classification for Information Retrieval and the Sixth International Study Conference on Classification Research in 1997.
The facet analytical approach so closely associated with the CRG has, however, been influential on classification research work, and a strong continuing line in the Department. McIlwaine’s revision of the Universal Decimal Classification along more rigorously faceted lines shows its direct influence, and there is an even closer link with the revision of Bliss’s Bibliographic Classification Second edition (BC2) which was brought to the Department by Broughton à as Joint Editor in 1997. The revision of BC2 was the major pre-occupation of the CRG in its latter years (post 1970) and that work was partly facilitated by the Department. As a consequence the influence of BC2 on other major classification systems was chosen as one of the first Impact Case Studies in the Research Assessment Exercise in 2014.
Broughton, Vanda. 2012. “Brian Vickery and the Classification Research Group – the Legacy of Faceted Classification”. In Facets of Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the Second National ISKO UK Conference, edited by Alan Gilchrist and Judi Vernau. Emerald: London, 315-26.
McIlwaine, Ia C. and Vanda Broughton. 2000. “The Classification Research Group–Then and Now”. Knowledge Organization 27, no. 4: 195-199. Also available in ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization, edited by Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli
International Society for Knowledge Organization United Kingdom Chapter
A national chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization was formed in London in 2007 with Broughton à as Chair, Aida Slavic as Secretary (now Chair) and Bob Bater as Treasurer. Slavic, a member of the UDC Editorial Board (and later to be Editor-in-Chief) had been a doctoral student in the School under the supervision of McIlwaine à.
At the time the ISKO membership in the UK was low, but the UK Chapter became one of the most successful in terms of its activities and the size of attendance at events, and it served as a model for a number of other new chapters. The 2004 International ISKO Conference had been hosted by the School, and the UK Chapter went on to hold a biennial conference from 2009, and regular one day events two or three times a year. Facilities and services were provided by UCL until 2017 and the Department managed much of the administration with its doctoral students helping on the ground.
The biennial conferences were internationally attended, and audiences of up to 100 were normal for the one day gatherings. Conference proceedings were published by Aslib and Ergon and later disseminated through the website. In 2011 the Conference was dedicated to the memory of Brian Vickery à and explored the theme of “Facets of Knowledge Organization”. A Conference Archive of papers, slides and audio recordings is maintained on the website.
ISKO UK has been particularly effective in bringing together academics, consultants, and practitioners of KO in a wide range of sectors, acting as a powerful vehicle of information transfer. Today the regular Meetup sessions provide a forum for face-to-face engagement of KO professionals. It has also functioned as an educational resource making materials freely available on its website. At the time of CoVID it organized a series of online lectures and presentations which attracted an international audience; this practice has continued today with the Research Observatory.
Ia McIlwaine 1935-2019
Ia McIlwaine was Professor of Library and Information Studies at UCL, and Director of the School from 1995-2001.
She was a student in the Department in 1957-8, and came back as a Lecturer in 1963 to teach classification, as well as subject bibliography. She continued the strong tradition of classification and indexing work in the School, which had begun with Charles Berwick Sayers à, whose pupil Ranganathan à was in the 1920s. During her tenure at UCL she would also serve as a member of staff under Brian Vickery à another star in the School’s classification firmament. At a time of waning interest in classification in most UK library schools, she kept it solidly and centrally on the curriculum at UCL, and sustained it as a distinctive feature of the UCL department with a programme of international events and a lively group of research students; some of her doctoral students now occupy leading roles in the world of library and information science in general, and classification in particular (Broughton 2019, 573).
She was an active member of the International Society for Knowledge Organization, being President from 2001-2005, as well as a longstanding member of the Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Editorial Board of its journal Knowledge Organization. For a number of years she served on the IFLA Committee for Classification and Indexing, and the FID/Classification Research Committee. She was also, in its latter years, Secretary of the UK Classification Research Group à. In addition, she was a member of the British Standards Institution Committee on Indexing, an observer on the Committee of the Bliss Classification Association, and served on the British Committee for the Dewey Decimal Classification.
Her major contribution to classification research lies in her work on the revision of the Universal Decimal Classification, of which she became Editor-in-Chief in 1993. In this she sought to bring a more rigorous and logical basis to UDC using the techniques of facet analysis pioneered by Ranganathan à and the CRG à. At the same time she pursued a policy of collaboration and integration with other editors of general schemes, particularly the Dewey Decimal Classification, with whose editors she worked closely. The revision work on UDC continues today under the general Editorship of her former PhD student Aida Slavic.
Broughton, Vanda. 2019. “Obituary. Emeritus Professor Ia McIlwaine: An Appreciation”. Knowledge Organization 46(8) doi: 10.5771/0943-7444-2019-8-573.
McIlwaine, I. C. 1995. “UDC Centenary: The Present State and Future Prospects”. Knowledge Organization 22: 64-69.
McIlwaine, I. C. 1997. “Classification Schemes: Consultation with Users and Cooperation Between Editors.” In Cataloging and Classification: Trends, Transformations, Teaching, and Training, edited by J. R. Shearer and A. R. Thomas. New York: Haworth, 81-95. [Also published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 24, nos. 1/2: 87-90.]
Universal Decimal Classification Consortium