African Studies Center Leiden Thesaurus Review
The UW course LIS 530: Organization of Information and Resources was a comprehensive overview of the wide world of knowledge organization. Having been forewarned on the difficulty of the class, I was happy to find that I developed a strong fundamental understanding of the many topics we covered. Over the quarter, I learned about bibliographic objectives, standards of metadata and bibliographic identifiers, and various approaches to subject analysis and vocabulary control. To finish the quarter, I was asked to review the thesaurus of the ASCL (African Studies Center Leiden, or Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden) along the multiple axes of knowledge organization that I had learned.
The knowledge organization concepts used to analyze the ASCL thesaurus are myriad, including the level of pre- or post-coordination found in the included indexing terms, the ease of new term creation, and the analysis of work-specific term selection along axes of specificity, exhausitivity, and coextensivity. Similarly to the relevant coursework, this paper is quite conceptually dense, but successfully demonstrates my understanding and ability to apply the core tenets of successful and mindful knowledge organization.