Communication and Classification in the Next Century

Ia McIlwaine

Professor of Library and Information Studies, University of London
Director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London

Monday, 26 October 1998

1:00-1:30 Refreshments
1:30-3:00 Presentation

OCLC Auditorium
6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, OH 43017

With the rapidly expanding growth of international communication on an unprecedented scale, it is vital that those concerned with knowledge organization across the world, in many different spheres and for many different purposes, should have a better knowledge and understanding of what others have done.

Taking Francis Miksa's premise that in the future the individual will need to create his own method of applying the tools available for knowledge organization (as outlined in his recent book The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge and the Post Modern Library), a brief comparison of the adaptability for this purpose of both the DDC and the UDC is followed by an examination of the wider issues of both knowledge structures and terminology for the retrieval of information in the future.

Ia McIlwaine is currently professor of library and information studies at the University of London. She is also director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London, where she teaches classification.

Ia is the editor-in-chief of the Universal Decimal Classification, chair of the IFLA Committee of Classification and Indexing and FID/Classification and Knowledge Organization and Research Committee.