SIMS 245 Organization of Information in Collections. Buckland. Spring 2000.

VERBAL ACCESS Revised March 6, 2000. (See also Taylor ch 7; Wynar, 8th ed. ch. 21 & 24).

"If the names of the classes, in a natural language, are used to arrange them, we do not get a helpful order. In fact names scatter classes in a most unhelpful chaotic order. It will give us an order like algebra, anger, apple, arrogance, asphalt, and astronomy." (S. R. Ranganathan).

Searching For Word Occurrences in Natural Language And Indexes With "Uncontrolled" Vocabulary is very economical but unreliable because of the variety in language usage.

"Controlled" Vocabulary (Thesaurus, List of subject headings). Definitions (Scope notes) and "syndetic" structure (cross references, etc.) are supposed to take care of synonyms, homographs, broader, narrower, and related terms (e.g ERIC Thesaurus, LCSH).

Word adjacency and collocation e.g. "information (w2) retrieval" in DIALOG.

Word frequency. Automated retrieval often uses the frequency of the occurrence of a given word in a document -- or the difference between the frequency of occurrence of the word in one document and the frequency of occurrence of the word in all other documents.

KWIC (KeyWord In Context) and rotated strings. Preserving some of the context of a word may augments its meaning, e.g. Rotated index to ERIC Thesaurus. Commonly applied to titles.

KWIC, KWAC, and KWOC are simple, mechanical term extraction indexes for text (usually titles) which retain some of the context (i.e. adjacent words). See Wynar, 8th ed., p. 465. Consider the title: Cataloging and classification for Croatians. Treat "and" and "for" are stop-words, i.e. not to be used as index terms.

KWIC KeyWord In Context Each word that is not a stop-word becomes an entry word (aka lead term). Entry words are aligned within the page.

KWAC KeyWord Alongside Context. As KWIC but with entry words justified at left

Cataloging and classification for Croatians.

classification for Croatians. Cataloging and

Croatians. Cataloging and classification for

KWOC KeyWord Out of Context. Entry at left (or above). Context not wrapped around the entry word.

Cataloging Cataloging and classification for Croatians.

classification Cataloging and classification for Croatians.

Croatians. Cataloging and classification for Croatians

PRECIS (PREserved Context Index System). Used on British National Bibliography. A verbal statement of the topic of a document is augmented with additional coding for syntactic and semantic relationships (and additional terms) to ensure that computer-generated index entries derived from each significant term in the string will generate an unambiguous index entry with context.

Library of Congress Subject Headings. Required Reading: The prefatory pages of LCSH.

1. LC SUBJECT SUBHEADINGS:

(i) "Floating" (i.e. standardized) subdivisions generally applicable to (most) headings:

1. Topical (e.g. -- Harvesting);

2. Form (i.e. what the form of the work is, not what it is about) e.g. -- Periodicals; -- Dictionaries; -- Addresses...)

3. Chronological, usually specific to topic.

4. Geographic, e.g. Agriculture -- Albania.

(ii) Pattern headings. Sets of subdivisions that can be used within a limited range of similar topics, e.g. any animal can use subdivisions like those given for Fishes.