KNOWLEDGE DOMAINS - MULTIDISCIPLINARITY AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS

Bibliographic classification systems purport to organize the world of knowledge for information storage and retrieval purposes in libraries and bibliographies, both manual and online. The major systems that hav e predominated during the twentieth century were originally predicated on the academic disciplines. This structural principle is no longer a dequate because multidisciplinary knowledge production has overtaken m ore traditional disciplinary perspectives and produced communities of cooperation whose documents cannot. be accommodated in a disciplinary structure. This paper addresses the problems the major classifications face; reports some attempts to revise these systems to accommodate mu ltidisciplinary works more appropriately, and describes some theoretic al research perspectives that attempt to reorient classification resea rch toward the pluralistic needs of multidisciplinary knowledge creati on and the perspectives of different discourse communities. Traditiona lly, the primary desiderata of classification systems were mutual excl usivity and joint exhaustivity. The need to respond to multidisciplina ry research may mean that hospitality mill replace mutual exclusivity and joint exhaustivity as the most needed and useful characteristics o f classification systems ill both theory and practice.