New Formats, Shifting Fortunes: Late-Twentieth-Century KO in the Wild

Abstract

: Three candidates for the knowledge organization (KO) systems that enjoyed the widest, most popular usage in the late twentieth century are (1) Encyclopædia Britannica’s Propædia or “Outline of Knowledge,” (2) the “Synopsis of Categories” at the heart of HarperCollins’ Roget’s International Thesaurus , and (3) OCLC’s Dewey Decimal Classification . Surprisingly, given the popularity of these systems (which continues in the latter two cases into the 2020s), only the last has received special attention in the ISKO community. The goal of this paper is to compare the function, form, and content of each of the three systems, in the context of a taxonomy of evaluation methods for KO applications that takes into account similarities and differences in formats and purposes.