This essay addresses issue of uniformity or consistency in application of subject headings--as distinct from consistency among headings--to books on any given topic. Discussion covers purpose of subject headings or descriptors, reliability of choices made by catalogers when assigning subject headings, and card and online catalogs. (18 references)…

Relative effectiveness of indexing using full-text or less than full-text was tested using non-Boolean, chaining type of file structure and searching method. Indexing was done using titles, abstracts, full-text, references, and various combinations; Goffman's indirect method of information retrieval was used to structure and search file.…

Briefly describes use of off-site staffing--indexers, abstractors, editors--in the production of two major databases: Management Contents and The Computer Data Base. Discussion covers the production sequence; database administrator; off-site indexer; savings (office space, furniture and equipment costs, salaries, and overhead); and problems…

A group of research projects based at HP-Labs Bristol, the University of Bristol (England) and ARKive (a new large multimedia database project focused on the worlds biodiversity based in the United Kingdom) are working to develop a flexible model for the indexing of multimedia collections that allows users to annotate content utilizing extensible…

Provides background of automatic indexing and overview of Fully Automatic Syntactically based Indexing of Text (FASIT), a system based on idea that content-bearing words belong to certain syntactic categories. Results of comparison of FASIT with thesaurus and stem-based indexing systems on database of 250 documents and 22 queries are summarized.…

Describes the organization of the House of Commons Library which provides information, documentation, and research services to its members and outlines the history of the Parliamentary On-Line Information System (POLIS). The physical description of POLIS, indexing practices, users, and the Library's subject thesaurus are discussed. Eight…

Discusses cross-language, multilingual, and bilingual information retrieval on the Web; evaluates retrieval effectiveness of indexing and search strategies based on test collections from CLEF (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum) in English, French, German, and Italian; and suggests and evaluates database merging strategies. Appendices include…

Reviews ConSearch 3.0, a product that provides flexible searching of electronic files, allowing the location of related meanings as well as exact matches. ConSearch 3.0 differs from other file retrieval approaches by relating words in search phrases of questions to the "meaning" of the words, which are stored in a "conceptual…

Describes a fully automated approach for indexing documents that is based on associating textwords in a training set of bibliographic citations with the indexing of journals. Discusses the use of journal descriptors (JDs) in the MEDLINE database that could also be used to search other journal articles, monographs, and Web documents. (Author/LRW)

A semantic analysis of the "Weekly Subject Index Stop Word List" of "Current Contents" of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the full-stop word and semi-stop word lists of the Permuterm Subject Index of "Science Citation Index" was conducted. Emphasizes the necessity of an improved, semantically-oriented policy in preparing lists…

Knowledge of empirical research has become important for everyone involved in education and special education. Policy, practice, and informed reporting rely on locating and understanding unfiltered, original source material. Although access to vast amounts of research has been greatly facilitated by online databases, such as ERIC and PsychInfo,…

The emphasis of this text is that the problems of information retrieval are the intellectual ones of subject analysis and description. These problems are not easily solved by technology alone, although certain inroads are being made by knowledge-based expert systems and other computer aids to indexing. Linguistic approaches are also showing…

This course syllabus for a continuing education course for health science librarians introduces the MEDLARS system, the MEDLINE database, and the Index Medicus. Designed to enable health science librarians to discriminate between the capabilities of manual searching and online retrieval, an overview is given of the nature and scope of MEDLINE and…

Findings are reported for a project designed to improve subject access to books by augmenting MARC records with subject descriptions. A BOOKS data base, consisting of humanities and social science monographs, was created and made available for online searching. The availability of suitable information in books to produce augmented subject…

A computer-based information storage and retrieval system was designed and implemented for processing Navy neuropsychiatric case history reports. The system design objectives were to produce a dynamic and flexible medical information processing tool. The system that was designed has been given the name NAVY MEDical Information STorage and…