'Facets' as Interdisciplinary undiscovered Public Knowledge: S.R. Ranganathan in India and L. Guttman in Israel

Undiscovered public knowledge is a relatively unstudied phenomenon, and the few extended examples that have been published are intradisciplinary. This paper presents the concept of ‘facet’ as an example of interdisciplinary undiscovered public knowledge. ‘Facets’ were central to the bibliographic classification theory of S.R. Ranganathan in India and to the behavioural research of L. Guttman in Israel. The term had the same meaning in both fields, and the concept was developed and exploited at about the same time in both, but two separate, unconnected literatures grew up around the term and its associated concepts. This paper examines the origins and parallel uses of the concept and the term in both fields as a case study of interdisciplinary knowledge that could have been, but was apparently not, discovered any time between the early 1950s and the present using simple, readily available information retrieval techniques.

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