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Jovita Kaur, Lovely Professional University Unit 8: Indexing

Notes
Unit 8: Indexing

CONTENTS
Objectives

Introduction

8.1 Indexing Development
8.1.1 Indexing Process

8.2 Index Development and Trends

8.3 Summary
8.4 Keywords

8.5 Review Questions
8.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Define indexing development
• Describe index development and trends
• Explain design phase and development phase.

Introduction

Indexing is depending both on the document to be indexed and on the indexer performing the process
under specific conditions in a specific environment. Different documents are of course indexed
differently by the same indexer. If they were not the index would be non-discriminative and total
useless. Any theory of indexing has to deal with this fact and thus with how document attributes or
properties should influence its representation.
The same document may be indexed differently by different indexers or by the same indexer at
different times or by different indexing systems or in different libraries, for different target groups
or for different ideal purposes.
The indexing is close to the document if it is constructed by a set of terms selected mechanically
from the document (e.g. from titles, references or full-text). This is the objective pole because the
document is the object of the indexing process. Also the rhetorical view of indexing (Andersen
2004) is close to the objective pole emphasizing what the author of the document is arguing.
The subjective pole of indexing theory emphases that the same document may be seen differently
by different people or systems and that the indexing should not aim at a purely objective
representation but should also consider, for example, the collection to which the document belongs
or the tasks for which the indexing is made. Automatic indexing usually represent the terms of a
document relative to the terms frequency in a collection of documents. In this way is the
representation not just a function of the document itself, but also a function of a collection.

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