Subject indexing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Subject indexing is the act of describing a document by index terms to indicate what the document is about or to summarize its content. The index terms are often selected from some form of controlled vocabulary.[1] Subject indexing is used in information retrieval especially to create Bibliographic databases to retrieve documents on a particular subject. Examples of academic indexing services are Zentralblatt MATH, Chemical Abstracts and PubMed. The index terms were mostly assigned by experts but author keywords are also common.
With the ability to conduct a full text search widely available, many people have come to rely on their own expertise in conducting information searches and full text search has become very popular. Subject indexing and its experts, professional Indexers and Librarians, remains crucial to information organization and retrieval. Indexers and Librarians understand controlled vocabularies and are able to find information that can't be located by full text search. The cost of expert analysis to create subject indexing is not easily compared to the cost of hardware, software and labor to manufacture a comparable set of full-text, fully searchable materials. With new web applications that allow every user to annote documents, social tagging has gained popularity especially in the Web.[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ F. W. Lancaster (2003): "Indexing and abstracting in theory and practise". Third edition. London, facet ISBN 1-85604-482-3. page 6
- ^ Voss, Jakob (2007). "Tagging, Folksonomy & Co - Renaissance of Manual Indexing?". Proceedings of the International Symposium of Information Science: 234–254.
