Areas of Interest

Summary statement:
Dr. Lussky’s research combines an interest in the sociology of scientific knowledge with historical and current practices in subject analysis.

As we learn more about our world, our understanding of truth changes. For example, there was a time, back in the early 1800s, when folks had no idea that the addition of something to the human body – something too small to see with the unaided eye – could cause disease. By the end of the 1880s, scholars came to accept that a germ could cause disease. Changes in accepted truth transform how we experience our world: how we contextualize what we read, what questions we ask, and how we write about these questions. My research involves studying these transformational events and the subject indexing accompanying them, as well as exploring how we can build flexible information storage and retrieval devices that accommodate the inevitable change in understanding inherent in a civilization that is curious and engaged in its world.

Specific Subject Areas

Sociology of scientific knowledge
Subject headings, taxonomy, and thesauri
Scholarly communication
Content analysis
Classification theory and research

Last updated: Fall 2007