Julia Bullard

“ Whereas the work of the knowledge organization field 150 years ago was to align a subject heading system to a real, external order of topics and their relationships, the current approach favours situated understandings of aboutness and local accountability.
Central to my view of such systems through critical theory is the recognition that infrastructural systems such as subject headings are socially constructed. They function as a shared basis of understanding on top of which more visible functions such as knowledge development and sharing exist. ”

“ To the extent that we expect Canadian scholarship to be recognizably different than US scholarship—arising from focuses on different locations, ecosystems, cultures, histories, laws, climates, media, languages, institutions, and regulations—building a system of terminology and definitions for one corpus will not entirely serve the other. From the perspective of infrastructure studies (Star 1999) and established critiques in knowledge organization, we would expect therefore to find a distortion of Canadian scholarship and research as it builds itself on top of the existing infrastructure. ”

“ The Infrastructure of Subjects Figure 1: Catalogued subject headings for Herman Melville's *Moby Dick* in the University of British Columbia Library System Determining what something is about is a fascinating question with elusive answers. One could spend a career, for example, making a case for the aboutness of Moby Dick, where aboutness refers to the subjects inherent to the intellectual and creative work. The idea that subjects are essential to an intellectual and creative work is itself a matter for debate and invites questions about authorial intent and readers’ agency. ”

“ When we make Canadian scholarship intelligible to education and scholarly communication systems, the terms we apply to our scholarship are largely from the United States in origin and in perspective. If we are to build open systems for scholarly communication, how much of the content and process of existing subject heading systems are appropriate, and how much must be redesigned with openness at the centre? ”

“ Given the impact of subject access systems on the organization of the collection and the ability to connect users to items, we constantly seek to improve the rigour of the process by which practitioners build, revise, and maintain these systems.
A fundamental shift in contemporary knowledge organization scholarship is the awareness that our systems always have and will always instantiate bias and perpetuate discrimination. No amount of increased technological capacity for complex connections among items and subjects or rigorous procedures for determining subjects will fix this. ”

“ In addition to facilitating system operations, this act of making our thoughts, our stories, and ourselves, intelligible is also a means of sense-making and mapping out our social and cultural worlds. ”

“ INKE should be a key vehicle for open and accountable subject description as it features the best practices to represent and facilitate access to scholarship in Canada. I see this potential work around knowledge organization and subject access in particular as being one among many types of infrastructure design this community will consider in creating platforms for open access. For the Humanities Commons, for example, how much of the infrastructure can be imported from other contexts, such as the MLA Commons, and how much can be designed locally? ”

“ Changes to digital technologies produce new kinds of technical metadata—data from the object may be more or less accurately transcribed, and expressing the aboutness of the object is a constantly moving target regardless of the technology or platform. ”