Page 199 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes The arrangement of the documents on shelves is in a near neighbourhood relation. Documents on
closely related subjects are brought together. Ranganathan called this as APUPA arrangement. It
helps the searcher to have a panoramic view of the documents and, thus, browse while searching
for his documents. Similar display of document surrogates would not have been possible by verbal
representation of subjects. To enable such display, indexing languages make use of different
techniques.
An indexing language is a “language1” used for subject classification or -indexing of documents.
(Not used about systems for descriptive cataloguing or -indexing).
Indexing languages may be divided into “classification systems” and “verbal indexing languages”,
although this is a superficial distinction. Lancaster (2003) argues that one should not speak of
assigning classification codes as “classification” as opposed to the assignment of indexing terms as
“indexing”. “These terminological distinctions are quite meaningless and only serve to cause
confusion”. That this distinction is superficial is also evident from the fact that a classification system
may be transformed to a thesaurus and vice versa (cf., Riesthuis & Bliedung, 1991).
Classification systems may be divided into enumerative systems and faceted systems. Verbal indexing
systems may be divided into “controlled vocabularies” and “free text systems”. Controlled
vocabularies may be divided into “pre-coordinative indexing systems” and “post-coordinative
indexing systems”. Descriptors (taken from thesauri), for example, represent “post-coordinative
indexing systems”.
Indexing languages are kinds of metadata. Their function is to serve as subject access points (or to
supplement other kinds of subject access points, e.g. references, cf., citation Indexing)

Figure 11.1: Traditional view of the kinds of indexing languages

Indexing
languages

Classification Verbal indexing
systems languages

Enumerative Faceted systems Controlled Free text systems
systems systems

Pre-coordinative
systems

Post-coordinative
systems

Figure 11.2: Theoretically based view of the kinds of indexing languages

Indexing
languages

Controlled
systems Non-controlled
systems

194 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY