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Reading: The Nature of Indexing

Wednesday 2nd March, 2011 - 5:56pm with 0 comments

Subject: Storing Objects and Artifacts
Reading: Anderson, J.D. & Pérez-Carballo, J. (2001). ‘The nature of indexing: how humans and machines analyze messages and texts for retrieval. Part I: Research, and the nature of human indexing’, Information Processing and Management, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 231-254

  • human indexing, automatic indexing
  • indexing: pointing to or indicating content, meaning, purpose and features
  • IR = information retrieval – other texts, human indexing
  • in an IR situation there is the user and the IR system/databases
  • IR research notes: size of documentary units, extent of indexable matter, exhaustivity, specificity, browsable displayed indexes, searching syntax, display syntax, vocabulary management, surrogation
  • perceptual processing: cues from text
  • conceptual processing: prior knowledge
  • cataloging: indexing to a particular collection of documents (Chan, L.)
  • classification is conceptual rather than alphabetic headings
  • “request-oriented indexing”: indexing according to what users are looking for (Soergel, D.)
  • effective indexing is not just what it is about but why it is useful to users (Lancaster, F.W.
  • “what kind of person uses it for what, what other texts are used, what ways they depend on each other” (Fairthorne, R.)
  • subject as “relationship between the individual and the squiggles that constitute the document” (O’Connor, B.)
  • indexing is a cognitive process (cognitive approach to IR)
  • shift indexing theory away from rule discovery and toward rule construction
  • indexing rests on rules formed by culture.
  • two step process in human indexing; 1) analysis of text resulting in some kind of notion representing meaning, 2) translation of this notion into indexing language or format prescribed by IR database
  • most guidelines for indexers side-step issues of quality, authority, accuracy, appropriateness
Posted on: Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at 5:56 pm
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