School of Information Management & Systems. Spring 2004.
245
Organization of Information in Collections. M. Buckland.
VERBAL ACCESS
(Taylor Organization 1st ed, ch 7; 2nd ed., mainly ch 10.
Taylor Wynar, 9th ed. ch. 14 & 17).
"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
indicate 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, 9th ed., p. 408-11. Consider the title:
Cataloging and classification for Croatians.
Treat "and" and "for" as 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.
| for Croatians. |
Cataloging and classification |
Cataloging and |
classification for Croatians. |
for | Croatians.
Cataloging and classification |
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). Developed for the
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.
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 document is,
not what it is about
e.g. -- Periodicals; -- Dictionaries.).
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.