Content provided in partnership with
Faceted classification and logical division in information retrieval
Library Trends, Wntr, 2004 by Jack Mills
Mechanical aids were soon supplanted by electronic systems, and a still more drastic change in indexing practice followed. With the development of networks for electronic retrieval, the economic burden presented by the prior indexing of individual records (typically, for services operated commercially) became prohibitive. Now, it was not just a case of abandoning the intellectual precoordination of index terms but the abandoning of preindexing altogether. Reliance was to be entirely on keywords found in the record and recognized by electronic searching. Indexing devices developed by librarians can only be used indirectly, by assisting the framing of requests to search engines. The limited discriminatory powers of keywords, with all their attendant ambiguities in the unruly natural language, were now supplemented by new index devices, with machines operating on the relatively raw text of the documents. All of them are based on the measurement of relatively artificial characteristics of documentary texts, such as frequency of occurrence of particular words, contiguity of particular words, etc., using statistical techniques and mathematical algorithms. These are deemed sufficiently correlative to conceptual meanings to form classes allowing searches defined conceptually. They constitute new index devices, but they are still classificatory in operation, establishing subclasses of the total store identified by the parameters of the technique used. They are not assigned by an indexer but must utilize the computer programs of the store's service provider.
- More Articles of Interest
- Information and its philosophy
- Knowledge profiling: the basis for knowledge organization
- Classification, rhetoric, and the classificatory horizon
- The epistemological foundations of knowledge representations
- Classification and categorization: a difference that makes a difference
The shift from IR from stores of limited size, in which trained librarians have prepared the field for searching by the prior indexing of materials, to much larger stores in which there has been only minimal preparation of the field has important implications for the relationship of libraries to information science. The cognitive processes connecting the producers of texts stored and the would-be recipients of the knowledge stored in the texts are the subject of much current research. However, the highly structured maps of knowledge developed by modern faceted classification apparently have considerable potential in assisting these processes.
4. INDEXING IN THE LIBRARY TODAY
The inroads on the librarian's time made by the need to master rapidly developing computer techniques has had a particularly unfortunate effect on the curriculum of library schools, where the study of the organization of knowledge has been eroded just when the need for it has become greater. The information explosion led, inter alia, to the development by librarians of greatly improved index languages, largely based on facet analysis. The relevance of these to the future of the profession assumes two things: first, that the library will continue to be an integral part of our culture and that reports of the birth of the paperless society have been greatly exaggerated; and second, and following from the above, we have an obligation to seek the best possible ways of facilitating its work. The development of logically structured classifications covering the whole of knowledge is still unique in the field of LIS. These provide detailed maps of knowledge to assist in the searching of stores of records and can be used as the basis of, or valuable supplements to, numerous other retrieval languages.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Health
- AAACN Viewpoint
- ABNF Journal, The
- AIDS Treatment News
- AMAA Journal
- Aboriginal Nurse, The
- Adolescence
- Adolescent Psychiatry
- Advances in Skin & Wound Care
- Age and Ageing
- Alabama Nurse
- Alberta RN
- Alcohol Research & Health
- Alternative Medicine Review
- American Family Physician
- American Fitness
- Men's Fitness
- Psychology Today
- Shape
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »