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Faceted classification and logical division in information retrieval
Library Trends, Wntr, 2004 by Jack Mills
12.1. Subject headings
The original form taken by these is familiar to all librarians and is exemplified for general collections by the Sears and Library of Congress subject headings. The first feature to be noted is the absence of any serious provision for the specificity demanded by a special collection. This inevitably impairs its ability to locate subjects precisely. The second is the relative arbitrariness in the provision made for the relating function. While the indication of broader and narrower terms inevitably invokes the classification, the choice of terms related in ways other than in generic and partitive hierarchies is usually highly pragmatic and unpredictable.
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12.2. Specificity in subject headings
If a subject heading is to provide for the multiplicity of relations considered earlier under faceted classification and that frequently arise now even at the level of books and monographs, predictability in locating demands that comprehensive rules must be observed governing the citation order of components in any given string of terms. The general principle observed is said to be that of immediate access via the sought term. But this only begs the question as to what that term is when faced with even quite simple subjects; e.g., an inquirer looking for child psychology looks under psychology of children; an enquiry for works on the economic history of Britain in the Victorian period poses immediately which of the six likely (or twenty-four possible) combinations of terms should be tried first.
12.3. Relator systems
Since the 1950s, several different systems have been developed, each using their own set of rules for citation order. The term "relators" is often used to describe the conceptual relationships underlying their rules and the symbols that may be used to signal those relationships. The main systems are Farradane's relational analysis (Farradane, 1950), SYNTOL (Gardin, 1965), the British Technology Index (BTI) (1962-; Coates, 1960), and PRECIS (Austin, 1984). The latter (its name standing for Preserved context indexing system) was originally designed as an alphabetical index to the classified British National Bibliography (BNB) but with particular regard for the way in which this might be computer-assisted. The syntactical strings it developed were later applied to free-standing alphabetical indexes. The interaction of classification, categories, and relations is analyzed in a key paper by Coates (1973). The distinction between categories and relations in the context of the classified index, was considered briefly in Section 6.1. The central problem in the case of specific alphabetical subject headings is essentially the same. To achieve predictability in locating, rules for citing the terms in a compound heading must be strictly observed. Clearly, many of the same rules as those described in Section 8.1/3 can be applied. The resulting strings can be seen to consist of a leading term, however arrived at, followed by the other terms according to their relationship to that leading term. A very practical advantage of this articulation of relationships independently of any given classification system is that a special library can set up such an index with minimal recourse to existing index languages (Coates, 1973).
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