Melodie Fox

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee | UWM · School of Information Studies

Can a catalog “care” about its users? This question, introduced at the first Ethics of Information Organization conference in 2009, asked whether catalogs adhere to the ethic of care, the theory put forward by Tronto (1994) and others that calls for context and flexibility in ethical decision-making. This keynote address for the 4th International C...

The recognition of a spectrum of gendered and sexed people, along with changing social conventions, has caused disruption in the absolute and binary divisions between male and female, man and woman. Gender and sex are formally classified for many purposes; however, formal classifications can marginalize people with variable sex or those who do not...

The hallmark of Hope Olson's work has been to use a different set of analytical tools to examine our knowledge organization systems from humanistic, feminist, and philosophical angles. These perspectives have led to the uncovering of many instances and types of bias that lead to the marginalization of human groups. An important phenomenon her work...

A concept that has experienced significant change in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is " inter-sex people, " historically known as hermaphrodites or the condition of hermaphroditism. The classification of the concept of intersex has changed in 14 out of the 23 editions of the DDC; it has changed in every edition since the twelfth. It has ha...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss and shed light on the following questions: What is an author? Is it a person who writes? Or, is it, in information, an iconic taxonomic designation (some might say a “classification”) for a group of writings that are recognized by the public in some particular way? What does it mean when a search en...

A naive user seeking introductory information on a topic may perceive a domain as it is shown by the search results in a database; however, inconsistencies in indexing can misrepresent the full picture of the domain by including irrelevant documents or omitting relevant ones, sometimes inexplicably. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on the doma...

The first (1876), second (1885), and seventeenth (1965) editions of the Dewey Decimal Classification each represent a major change in the way sex and gender are classified. The intention in this paper is to determine how closely the changes in the DDC correspond to shifts in medical thought regarding sex and gender classification. The metanarrative...

Social tagging has been lauded for providing a voice of the user community, free of restrictions dictated by knowledge organization standards for subject access. Tagging allows many perspectives to be represented, but at what cost? Using deconstruction, Derrida argues that absolute hospitality is required to ensure justice for access and inclusiven...

It is well-established that classification standards have historically reflected hierarchy, power and knowledge in the culture from which they originate (Olson, 2002). Budd(2003) describes classification as an agent of “symbolic power,” and points out that without seeing classification as a “discursive act,” class differences can be perpetuated (p....

Social tagging has been lauded for providing a voice of the user community, free of restrictions dictated by knowledge organization standards for subject access. Tagging allows many perspectives to be represented, but at what cost? Using deconstruction, Derrida argues that absolute hospitality is required to ensure justice for access and inclusiven...

Ethical standards are required at both the individual and system levels of the information organization enterprise, but are those standards the same? For example, are the ethical responsibilities of DDCs editorial board fundamentally the same as for an individual cataloger? And, what are the consequences of decisions made using different ethical fr...

Proceedings of the Twelfth International ISKO Conference 6-9 August 2012 Mysore, India

Classical theories of classification and concepts, originating in ancient Greek logic, have been criticized by classificationists, feminists, and scholars of marginalized groups because of the rigidity of conceptual boundaries and hierarchical structure. Despite this criticism, the principles of classical theory still underlie major library classif...