Page 163 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes Subject indexing is the act of describing a document by index terms to indicate what the document
is about or to summarize its content. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels:
terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents (such as
books and articles) within a field of knowledge.

9.1 Cataloguing

A catalogue may be helpful in identifying known items or known works when some attributes can
be used as search keys (e.g., author name or title). In electronic catalogs a combination of search
keys such as words from titles and printing year may be used for known item searching. A catalog
may also be helpful in identifying not know items dealing with a particular subject such as World
War II. This last kind of searches are especially facilitated by classification codes (such as Dewey
Decimal Classification codes) or subject terms (such as Library of Congress Subject Headings) in
the records.
A distinction is often made between “descriptive cataloguing” and “subject cataloguing” and in
major research libraries the two processes may be administratively separated. (For example, the
Library of Congress, in 1941 reorganized the Classification Division and the Catalogue Division
into the Subject Cataloguing Division and the Descriptive Cataloguing Division). The descriptive
cataloguing is performed according to some rules (such as Anglo American Cataloguing Rules,
AACR2), while the subject cataloguing may be performed by some kind of classification scheme
and/or controlled or uncontrolled vocabular.
In major research libraries is “subject cataloguing” often made by subject specialists, while
“descriptive cataloguing” is done by librarians without subject specialializion. Wilson in 1989
questions the phrase “descriptive cataloguing”. (This question is at the deepest level a question of
the differences between proceses such as descriptions, analyses, interpretations and evaluations,
differences that are not simple to separate).
Anderson in 2003, uses the term “indexing” as a broader generic term for both “classification” and
“cataloguing” because cataloguing means producing record for a catalogue, while indexing and
classification are broader activities used on both catalogues and bibliographies among other.

The term “cataloguing” is often understood as “descriptive cataloguing” (as
opposed to subject indexing). The processes are quite different intellectual
processes. While “descriptive” cataloguing is mainly based on the knowledge
of a set of rules, subject analysis and indexing/classification is mainly-based on
subject knowledge related to the documents being indexed.

9.2 Subject Indexing

Subject indexing is used in information retrieval especially to create bibliographic databases to retrieve
documents on a particular subject. Examples of academic indexing services are Zentralblatt MATH,
Chemical Abstracts and PubMed. The index terms were mostly assigned which appropriately identify
the subject either by extracting words directly from the document or assigning words from a controlled
vocabulary . The terms in the index are then presented in a systematic order. Indexers must decide
how many terms to include and how specific the terms should be. Together this gives a depth of
indexing.

158 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY