A meeting was held to explore critical issues and problems related to subject access to online bibliographic records of monographic literature. The 23 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who attended represented national and research libraries, bibliographic utilities, database vendors, library schools, indexing and abstracting services,…

This examination of abstracting-indexing services for the field of history focuses on Historical Abstracts (HA) and America--History and Life (AHL), and their relationship to the American Bibliographical Center's Subject Profile Index (ABC-SPIndex). The history, scope, selection criteria, and classification arrangements of the two databases are…

Approaches to improved productivity in the input cycle of database creation are discussed in three papers. The discussions include problems with and potential impacts of computer support for indexers; conversion from a minicomputer based indexing and abstracting production system to a microcomputer network; and a computerized system for…

The Physical Diagnosis Slide Bank, a collaborative project of the Universities of Washington, California at San Diego, and Arizona, utilizes an online interactive computer program to access a collection of over 2000 teaching clinical slides. Searchable data elements for each slide in the bank include subject descriptors (MeSH); accession number;…

Based on a series of studies performed by ERIC/Information Resources staff and consultants which focused on the activities of over 40 experienced online searchers, this report offers the following suggestions for enhancing certain online retrieval system features and making improvements in ERIC vocabulary: (1) the implementation of an online…

Citation indexing, which matches linked articles through links with authors rather than through subject keyword matching, is particularly relevant to educational technology, a widely-spread subject with a special user group of varying interests, difficult to cover in one retrieval service, and whose terminology is often ambiguous. By including…

This overview of the current capabilities of subject access in online public catalogs discusses keyword searching versus subject cataloging, users' views of the online catalog, and user-friendly versus user-hostile systems. Existing online catalogs in public and academic libraries are cited as examples. (EJS)

Discusses indexing and retrieval for effective searches of digitized images. Reports on an empirical study about criteria for analysis and indexing digitized images, and the different types of user queries done in newspaper image archives in Denmark. Concludes that it is necessary that the indexing represent both a factual and an expressional…

Contains nine papers read at the National Cataloguing Conference for 1981 of the section entitled, "Subject Retrieval in the 1980s." Topics include cost of subject access, research problems, options for automated subject access, and authority control. (Library Association of Australia, The Science Center, 35 Clarence St., Sydney, NSW…

Proposes a model that assists in understanding indexing on the World Wide Web and presents an experiment assessing the validity of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) as a term weighting strategy for Web documents. Findings indicate that IDF scores are not stable in the heterogeneous and dynamic context of the Web. (Author/AEF)

This paper analyzes proposals for augmenting library bibliographic records for improved subject searching in online catalogs by providing access to parts of books. Arguments for and against adding book content indexing, possible fields for enrichment, and feasibility of 11 alternatives for providing such information are presented. Twenty-two…

Discusses future of online information retrieval systems in terms of types of computer hardware expected (noting size, memory, cost, microcomputers, peripherals); software expected; "user friendly" interfaces designed to enable users to search without special training; and new approaches to subject analysis and online searching.…

Presents a metric for comparing the performance of common classes of Internet information retrieval tools, including human indexed catalogs of Web resources and automatically indexed databases of Web pages. The benefit of the proposed metric is that it is relevance-based, and it facilitates the comparison of the performance of different classes of…

Describes an experimental system designed to organize and provide access to Web documents using a faceted pre-coordinate indexing system based on the Deep Structure Indexing System (DSIS) derived from POPSI (Postulate based Permuted Subject Indexing) of Bhattacharyya, and the facet analysis and chain indexing system of Ranganathan. (AEF)

Two programs addressed the development of information retrieval systems useful to a variety of users. One program was designed to examine aspects of indexing and information display. Experiments with different indexing and display systems revealed that for good relevance judgements, a display with full citation, keyboards, and abstract is…