Subject indexing

Subject indexing

Subject indexing is the act of describing a document by index terms to indicate what the document is about or to summarize its content. Indices 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.

The index terms are often selected from some form of controlled vocabulary.F. W. Lancaster (2003): "Indexing and abstracting in theory and practise". Third edition. London, facet ISBN 1-85604-482-3. page 6] 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 by experts but author keywords are also common.

With the ability to conduct a full text search widely available, many people have come to rely on their own expertise in conducting information searches and full text search has become very popular. Subject indexing and its experts, professional Indexers, Catalogers, and Librarians, remains crucial to information organization and retrieval. These experts understand controlled vocabularies and are able to find information that cannot be located by full text search. The cost of expert analysis to create subject indexing is not easily compared to the cost of hardware, software and labor to manufacture a comparable set of full-text, fully searchable materials. With new web applications that allow every user to annotate documents, social tagging has gained popularity especially in the Web.cite conference
first= Jakob | last = Voss
title = Tagging, Folksonomy & Co - Renaissance of Manual Indexing?
booktitle = Proceedings of the International Symposium of Information Science
pages = 234–254
date = 2007
url = http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701072]

One application of indexing, the book index, remains relatively unchanged despite the information revolution.

See also

* Metadata

References


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