The biennial General Assembly of ISKO International will be a virtual meeting held on Tuesday 7th of July 2020, 4 pm BST.

This year’s General Assembly will be the last under our old constitution before we transfer to the newly-incorporated non-profit organization in Canada. Currently ISKO is a German non-profit organization, which means that we are dependent on German-speaking members to handle all our formal registration and returns. Being incorporated in an English-speaking territory widens the scope for participation in the administration and oversight of the organization.

Members will be reviewing the new constitution and by-laws. Election to the Executive Board and appointment of the Board of Directors will take place by electronic poll in the week following the General Assembly.

How the BBC is approaching metadata quality measurement

by Jeremy Tarling, Data Governance Specialist at the BBC

The BBC has been using content metadata to drive audience-facing experiences for the past eight years. Over this time we have evolved a mixture of human and machine content descriptions with varying levels of metadata quality. In this talk Jeremy gave some background to how content metadata has evolved at the BBC and how we are now planning to develop common metrics based on metadata completeness, accuracy and provenance.

You can view Jeremy's slides here

This virtual Meetup was the first in the "Hidden World of Knowledge Organization" series in which we will be looking into situations and practices that can be understood and managed through the application of knowledge organization.

Slides presented by the speakers are available here

The second KO Meetup of 2020 was a hand-on session on data visualization led by Tara McDarby. Pitched at newcomers, this event provided an introduction to the subject. 

Using Python, Tara demonstrated how to use machine learning to produce data visualizations from textual data drawn from dataset held in the British Library Labs.

Presentation slides are available here 

ISKO UK is pleased to announce the launch of its 2020 research award for students who wish to engage in Knowledge Organization (KO) related studies and research.  Financial support of up to £500 is available:

·         to attend events that have a significant coverage of KO topics

·         towards expenses incurred in the course of a research project or part of a project with a significant KO aspect

Find out details here

The Knowledge Organization Meetup has resumed its evenings  with an interactive session: ‘Taxonomies/Thesauri/Ontologies – what’s best for me?’

Slides of Niké's presentation can be accessed here 

Niké Brown, member of ISKO UK and taxonomist at Wiley and Sons, has kindly agreed to introduce the topic and moderate the discussion. Niké has over 20 years of publishing and information management experience.

We hope that participants have left the Meetup with a better understanding of the differences between these formats of controlled vocabulary which, in turn, will give them confidence to decide which format to adopt for their respective needs. This session was designed mainly for newcomers to the world of taxonomies, but all were welcome!

At the 2019 Tony Kent Strix Annual Memorial Lecture, the 2018 winner of the Tony Kent Strix Award, Professor Pia Borlund of the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science at Oslo Metropolitan University, gave her lecture on the topic "Evaluation of information searching".

Dr Andrew Macfarlane, Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, opened last year's event with a presentation "Sender vs Recipient Orientated Information Systems Revisited."

Read the report of the event and listen to the recording of talks under the relevant event listed in the section 'Past events'.  

We were very sorry to hear of the death of Prof. Ia MacIlwaine, former President of ISKO and one of the founding members of the UK chapter.  She was a mentor to several generations of library and information professionals and a respected academic.  An obituary written by Prof. Vanda Broughton can be found on the UCL website

Along with SLA and SLA Europe, ISKO UK is pleased to support the forthcoming Taxonomy Boot Camp in London 15th and 16th October 2019. See details the full agenda here

As in previous years, there will be an informal networking evening from 18.45 onwards  at The Hand and Flower pub, 1 Hammersmith Road, London W14 8XJ  (opposite Olympia).

All welcomeI