Discusses standards as tools to promote compatibility and improve practice, the role of research versus expert opinion in creating standards, and the changing scope of indexing standards. The current draft of the NISO (National Information Standards Organization) American Standard Guidelines for Indexes in Information Retrieval (Z39.4) is…

Considers the role of human intellectual indexing in the face of increasingly sophisticated automatic indexing techniques. Critiques the comparative research and explores the nature of human analysis of messages or texts and efforts to formulate rules to make human practice more predictable. (Author/LRW)

Demonstrates application to art literature of indexing system which involves conceptual analysis of content and characteristics of documents using descriptors assigned to facets of the discipline and its literature. Indexing vocabulary and syntax, alphabetical and classified indexes, and exhaustivity of indexing are discussed. Sample indexes and…

Discussion of human intellectual indexing versus automatic indexing focuses on automatic indexing. Topics include keyword indexing; negative vocabulary control; counting words; comparative counting and weighting; stemming; words versus phrases; clustering; latent semantic indexing; citation indexes; bibliographic coupling; co-citation; relevance…

Information on the 48 courses, workshops, seminars, and other educational opportunities listed in this guide was gathered by questionnaires sent to schools of library and/or information science and organizations sponsoring training opportunities in indexing in the United States and Canada. The definition of indexing used is broad: it includes…