Organizing Knowledge: An Introduction to Managing Access to Information (3rd ed.)

The first (1987) and second (1992) editions of this well‐established work have been overtaken by time and, rightly, the authors have updated the text to take account of electronic information resources and document delivery. The principles of organizing information and knowledge are still very much there, shaping the argument, guiding the content, so that students starting information studies courses (and their lecturers) will find it as useful and approachable as ever. The new stuff – like the Internet, and online search services and databases – is discussed with reference to mainstream “organizing knowledge” criteria and never drifts self‐indulgently off into reprises of “yet another chapter on the Internet”. This is very much a work for the information studies collection, the information studies course, an excellent pre‐ and in‐course reading text, and highly relevant for elearning options (although probably not CPD). The discussion is clear and the material relevant to any English‐speaking cultural setting, making it good as a text anywhere. At the price, it comes well within the bounds of student budgets and can be sold on.

Readers familiar with earlier editions, as well those new to the work, will notice the emphasis on electronic information resources, bibliographies, catalogues and the like. There are four parts, one on basics (information, relevance, assets, structures, databases, markups and metadata), another on records (describing documents and common communications formats), a third on access (users and interfaces, indexing and search languages, LCSH, classification) and the last on systems (OPACs, distributed systems, Internet and search engines and document management, and the management of systems). Wide‐ranging and up‐to‐date reading lists support each chapter, and acknowledge the move into networked environments and knowledge management. It is a very informative book in the best sense – the student comes away, very quickly, with a clear sense of what is what, the context and key issues of subject retrieval, systematic arrangement and knowledge representation in the main classification schemes, developments in networking, and document publishing on the World Wide Web.

So, then, not so much “not much new for the old hand” but a wealth of sensible, inexorably mainstream information for the newcomer, laid out approachably. Unpatronizing, it takes nothing for granted (so inversion and pre‐coordination, facets and granularity are explained), but, felicitously, neither does it rush on ahead and presume knowledge – OPACs and subject gateways are things to be used, created, managed, and decisions about structuring and retrieving knowledge pervade the information manager’s job. The perspectives of the cataloguer, system manager, bibliographer and library trainer are understood, and examples (relationships in search languages, facet analysis, access points in catalogues, sample topics in classification) are plentiful. References to topical systems, applications and protocols (e.g. OCLC, EBSCO, BIDS, AskSam, Z39.50) encourage further reading and research, and there is no more history than absolutely necessary (e.g. the historiography of AACR2, how LCSH came to be known and loved). Rowley (head of the School of Management and Social Sciences at Edge Hill University College) and Farrow (late of the department of information at Manchester Metropolitan University) have produced a third edition which is commercially viable, readable and at a good price. They have avoided the many traps for a locus classicus text in its field and produced a book without a knowledge of which information students almost don’t deserve to pass their course: and that cannot be said of many texts in an over‐heated and overlapping field.