LIS 5043: Organization of Information
A subject is . . .
a representation of the intellectual content of an information object,
or
its aboutness, topic, theme, expressed concepts or ideas, area of interest or knowledge.
The traditional view of a subject . . .
is based on bibliographic conventions for representing textual objects
distinguishes between what an object is about and what an object is (i.e., subject description of intellectual content vs. physical description of container or package)
The traditional view of a subject . . .
assumes an object has identifiable intellectual content
Yet subjects are difficult or impossible to identify for a few textual objects and most nontextual objects
Subjective interpretation based on ambiguous, emotional content
Domain expertise of person doing subject representation
How do our choices align with user’s choices of search terms?
Materials that don’t lend themselves to simple subject representation
To distinguish between work and text
To clarify representations of various kinds of subjects
To provide more access points for searching
To provide intellectual access versus bibliographic access
Usually considered subject description:
Literary forms: poetry, essays
Popular genre: romance (fiction), jazz (music)
Type of info: correspondence, bibliography, statistics
Organization of info: calendar, outline, dictionary
Style or technique related to purpose or audience: comedy, drama, persuasion
Style or technique related to time period: Baroque (music), Impressionism (painting)
Usually considered physical description:
Physical media format: book, video, photo, map
Artifact format: sculpture, figurine, vase, shirt
Communication mode: text, image, video, audio
Technical digital format: ASCII/text, HTML, .pdf, .gif
Version/part of work: edition, translation, chapter
Subject descriptions serve to . . .
Subject indexing languages
Terms or vocabulary used to represent document content; access points for record retrieval
User-defined/assigned descriptors (social classification, folksonomies, ontologies)
Based on standardized or controlled vocabulary for describing concepts consistently
Terms are assigned to documents
Terms are in subject or descriptor field only
Searcher inputs only controlled vocabulary terms
Subject Authority Control
Vocabulary control of index terms or subject headings
Subject Authority File or List
All terms in any controlled vocabulary
Examples: subject headings list, thesaurus, OCLC subject authority file
Concepts
Subject authority files are databases or collections of subject authority records
Subject authority records contain controlled vocabulary representing subjects
Three kinds of subject authority files are subject headings, thesauri, and LC or OCLC’s authority file
Subject Headings Lists . . .
Skating
Administrative Law
Energy industries
Radioisotopes in cardiology
*and* Libraries and society
Cluttering (speech pathology)
Show driving of horse-drawn vehicles
Education, Bilingual
Argentina
Animated films
Provide descriptors for indexing and searching
Contain mostly single-concept terms
Indicate semantic relationships (BT, NT, RT. . .)
Are used to assign many terms to describe whole/partial document
Thesauri
Other useful resource
Based on existing vocabulary of documents
Terms are extracted or derived from titles, abstracts, full text
Terms are in title, abstract, descriptor, full-text fields
Searcher inputs any term likely to occur in free text
Attributes of documents and users
Record field that will contain the data
Domain
Scope
Specificity
Exhaustivity
Specificity
: extent to which index terms precisely represent the subject of the document. Can be general or more specific.Exhaustivity
: extent to which indexing represents all concepts in a document.Considerations
Is really a continuum
What are some of the issues of diversity when we discuss subject access?