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Buckland, M. (1999). Vocabulary as a central concept in library and
information science. In T. Arpanac et al. (Eds.), Digital libraries:
interdisciplinary concepts, challenges, and opportunities. Proceedings
of the Third International Conference on Conceptions of Library
and Information Science [CoLIS3] 23-26 May 1999, Dubrovnik,
Croatia, (p 3-12), Zagreb: Lokve. Available at
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/colisvoc.htm
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Yes it's preprint, but Wow, the typos! I usually expect more from
Buckland.
The content disappoints as well. There is this ongoing fetishizing of
classificatory subject heading systems. Buckland's examples, as he himself
states, are obvious and even hackneyed. They allow him to make his point
but why belabor it so?
Syndetic structures are valuable but expensive to create and subject
to the same limitations of the primary controlled vocabulary. I propose
instead systems which provide free text indexing of the primary vocabulary
with the option to include, choose and modify queries created out of a
collection of thesauri (in the Roget sense, not the older IS sense).
This will allow the searcher to take advantage of the dynamic nature of
language (about which Buckland seems to complain: he discusses the
enormous capacity of human speech to determine meaning through
interaction and then wants to minimize interaction in searching).
Beyond that, I agree--must agree--that vocabulary is central to
IS. Vocabulary is central to categorization. Categorization underlies IS.
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