The Ethics of Information Organization – Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

The Ethics of Information Organization – Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

May 22-23, 2009, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Information organization (IO), like other major functions of the information profession, faces many ethical challenges. In the IO literature, ethical concerns have been raised with regard to, for example, the role of national and international IO standards, providing subject access to information, deprofessionalization and outsourcing of IO, education of IO professionals, and the effects of globalization. These issues, and others like them, have serious implications for quality and equity in information access. The Center for Information Policy Research and the Information Organization Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee join in presenting this conference to address the ethics of information organization.

The themes of the conference may include, but are not limited to, ethical aspects of and approaches to:

* The role of standards in IO

* Subject access to information

* Description and Metadata

* Folksonomies and social tagging as IO

* Day-to-day practice in IO

* Professionalism and IO

* Education for IO

* Culture and IO

* Economic, social and political factors in IO

* International, multicultural and multilingual aspects of IO

The keynote speakers will be:

Clare Beghtol, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada

José Augusto Chaves Guimarães, Professor, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil

Janet Swan Hill, Professor, Associate Director for Technical Services, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, USA

We invite interested participants to submit proposals for papers to include: name(s) of presenter(s), title(s), affiliation(s), contact information and abstracts of 300-500 words. Presentations will be 30 minutes. Time will be set aside for questions as well as broader discussion. All abstracts will be published on the Web site of the UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research. Full papers will be further reviewed and selected for publication in a special issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly.

Abstracts due: January 1, 2009

Notification of acceptance by: February 1, 2009 Full papers due: April 3, 2009

Submit proposals electronically to: Hur-Li Lee, Chair of the Program Committee (hurli@uwm.edu)

The Program Committee:

Grant Campbell, Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario, Canada

Allyson Carlyle, Associate Professor, University of Washington

Clara M. Chu, Associate Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Edwin Michael Cortez, Professor/Director, University of Tennessee

Birger Hjørland, Professor, The Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark

Hur-Li Lee, Chair, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Steven J. Miller, Senior Lecturer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Hope A. Olson, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Sandra Roe, Editor, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly and Bibliographic Services Librarian, Milner Library, Illinois State University

Richard P. Smiraglia, Professor, Long Island University

Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Sponsors:

Center for Information Policy Research, UW-Milwaukee Information Organization Research Group at UW-Milwaukee University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Milwaukee Public Libraries

QI2009

Received this from Ann Doyle. Thanks Ann!

The Fifth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2009) is now taking submissions online. The theme of the 2009 Congress is "Advancing Human Rights Through Qualitative Research."

The 2009 Congress will offer scholars the opportunity to form coalitions and engage in debate and dialogue on on how qualitative research can be used to bridge gaps in cultural and linguistic understandings. Delegates will address such topics as academic freedom, researcher safety, indigenous human rights, human rights violations, ethical codes, torture, political violence, social justice, racial, ethnic and gender and environmental disparities in education, welfare and healthcare, truth and reconciliation commissions, justice as healing. Delegates will consider the meaning of ethics, evidence, advocacy and social justice under a humane human rights agenda.

Sessions will take up such topics as: the politics of evidence; alternatives to evidence-based models; mixed-methods; public policy discourse; social justice; human subject research; indigenous research ethics; decolonizing inquiry; standpoint epistemologies. Contributors are invited to experiment with new methodologies, and new presentational formats (drama, performance, poetry, autoethnography, fiction). Such work will offer guidelines and exemplars showing how qualitative research can be used in the human rights and policy-making arenas.



To submit a paper or poster abstract or a panel, please visit the website below:

www.icqi.org

Starting a Taxonomy of Engagement Factors

I have had a couple of offline discussions about what factors we might think about when we think about engaged KO (eKO). I've also had one comment posted. From these sources I've started a list below (still incomplete). Do these resonate with anyone?

1. Implementation by groups previously without KO (in some contexts this is a big deal, but still need particulars on how we show evidence that this is *positive* change)

2. Division of labour statistics - how work in government and universities is divided (is theoretical at this point, requires data or argument to be seen as evidence in my opinion)

3. Infrastructure decisions based on KO - can airports run ontologies based on a particular set of methods and not others? (ongoing discussion in ontology engineering I've been told)

4. Economic latitude - saving money through KO so that it can be spent elsewhere (some work has been done on this I think)

5. The stuff of human flourishing - what KO does to allow for human flourishing... (very vague)

Positive Social Change?

What is a positive effect in this context - in KO? What is a positive social change?

Is it an intervention that increases the potential for human flourishing? And is there, in this vein, a discrete list of actions that can be identified as factors that contribute to human flourishing? Or is the concept of human flourishing as vague as the concept of positive social change?

Could it be that positive effect is not about human flourishing as much as it is about economics? That we can define all positive effects of KO to the reduction in cost in time and/or money? This is positive because it would leave room for spending time and/or money on other things, rather than on information organization, and its consequent benefits.

There are other ways to look at this, yes? What are they? Aren't lists of "good things" controversial precisely because their inventory is not discrete and that such an assemblage can be read in a pejorative or paternalistic way?

Even with this trouble, it seems that we'll need to define what a positive effect is in order to prove whether KO research brings it into being.

Thoughts?

Engaged Knowledge Organization?

Can Knowledge Organization (KO) researchers provide evidence that their work is changing the world for the better? What are the pieces of evidence? What are the metrics for KO research that effects positive social change?

This blog, and this first blog post, are asking this question. I believe it can be asked of KO writ large, including metadata design and implementation, ontology engineering, and cognate fields. However, my specific interest is in the field of KO [1].

The question is not whether what we do is good, it's how do we prove we're making positive social change by doing this expensive, time consuming, and seemingly rarefied research and development.


[1] Lifeboat for Knowledge Organization.
Available: http://www.db.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/home.htm