Where We’ve Been, Where We Are,

Where We’re Going

Hope A. OlsonUniversity of Wisconsin Milwaukee

 Clare Beghtol

University of Toronto 

Barbara H. KwaśnikSyracuse University

ASIST SIG/CR , Nov. 13. 2004

If you want a future, darling,

Why don’t you get a past?

Cole Porter, “Let’s Misbehave”

Why?

Creating the present from the past is a complex undertaking, and looking into the future from the present is chancy too. New relationships among the three are constantly discovered, affirmed, redrawn or predicted. It is thus both necessary and useful to look back in order to look ahead.

Our presentations today look at classification research from the vantage points of all three times—from the past to the present and from the present to the future. …

Why?

We range from Olson’s research into Bacon’s thought in the seventeenth century, through Beghtol’s description of the classificatory work of James Duff Brown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to Kwaśnik’s analysis of PRECIS (Preserved Context Indexing System) in relation to the ontologies of our own time.

Through these lenses, we can clarify the past, make the present whole and help the future happen.