Knowledge organization at DIS

Knowledge organization has been a core constituent of teaching and research at DIS since the inception of the School. It has a long history of leadership in the development of the Anglo-American tradition, and includes among its past members some extremely eminent names in cataloguing and classification, and in information science and retrieval, not the least of whom is S. R. Ranganathan, who was a student here in 1920s. Today it is one of only a handful of departments which has maintained cataloguing and classification as a required element of post-graduate teaching, and the strength of its teaching staff is reflected in a wide range of professional and research activities.

DIS staff are involved with ongoing changes to the main cataloguing standards, and to three of the major schemes of classification: the Dewey Decimal Classification, Universal Decimal Classification, and the Bliss Bibliographic Classification Second Edition.

Research activity is centred around the creation of new terminologies and syntaxes for these systems, and also on the further advancement of the facet analytical approach to retrieval. DIS also has strong links to research communities within the wider profession, and it provides a home for ISKO UK, the newly formed chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization, the lead research body in this field, and for the Bliss Classification Association. In the past DIS was also the venue for the UK Classification Research Group.