Organising Knowledge in a Global Society: Principles and Practice in Libraries and Information Centres

Citation

Guha, M. (2005), "Organising Knowledge in a Global Society: Principles and Practice in Libraries and Information Centres", Library Review, Vol. 54 No. 9, pp. 536-536. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530510629588

My employers recently appointed a Director of Knowledge Management with an institutional remit so sweeping and all‐embracing that it would obviously have been impertinent for a mere humble librarian like myself, obsessed as I am with the day‐to‐day minutiae of checking bibliographic records in on‐line catalogues, to even consider applying. My interest was, nevertheless, aroused. Clearly I ought to have been looking at the wider global picture of knowledge‐based services, rather than worrying about local interpretations of library of congress subject headings. From its title I had assumed that this book would give me just such a global picture. The fact that my new knowledge director is Australian and that the book hails from Australia seemed an added bonus – it would give me a much clearer idea of the ways in which she would be leading us on to the sunny uplands of the global information‐based future. Instead, rather to my disappointment, it turned out to be a quite straightforward manual of Australian library cataloguing practices. If this is organising knowledge then just what do they think I have been doing all these years?

As a cataloguing manual this is pretty good. Australian practice obviously has to take account of both British and American approaches, so the book could be very useful for comparative purposes. There are detailed chapters on the minutiae of checking bibliographic records, clear and comprehensive discussions of the use of library of congress subject headings, stuff about PRECIS and on the construction of faceted classification schemes that bring back happy memories of library school, and chunky chapters on bibliographic utilities, focussing on OCLC. All this is very welcome and potentially useful, but a couple of paragraphs on metadata and one short bland chapter on subject access to web content does not, to my mind, make this into a book on knowledge management.

Students of book cataloguing and classification may find this to be a useful, clearly laid out, manual of comparative library practices. Readers looking for a broader vision of the organisation of knowledge in a global society should look elsewhere.