Knowledge organization landscape: A content analysis of introductory courses

This paper presents the results of a study examining the subject content of knowledge organization courses taught in ALA-accredited LIS programs. Close to 2,000 course readings of introductory-level knowledge organization courses from 34 Library and Information Science (LIS) schools in the U.S. and Canada were analyzed and indexed. Results indicate that traditional bibliographic methods and practices remain at the core of knowledge organization courses. Findings also show that metadata has become a central component of course content and new topics from information architecture to markup languages and semantic web are becoming part of introductory-level knowledge organization education.