Taxonomy

A few days ago the Local Government Association urged local government to reduce its use of jargon. The story got covered quite widely in the press as an opportunity to prick official pomposity.  Fascinatingly, one of the 200 words they highlighted was ‘taxonomy’, the science of classification. This to my mind indicates that these local government bigwigs both want to be seen as capable of understanding complex data structures, and also perceive a need for people or systems to make them manageable. But what doesn’t seem to have occurred to many of them (or indeed the press)  is that there is a profession trained over decades to use and create classification structures: librarians (although I’m not sure that all Librarians would agree!).  Maybe this is yet another instance of our profession’s public image conflicting with the benefit it can offer to society….