This thesaurus, developed by the National Information Center for Educational Media (NICEM), represents an expansion of the NICEM subject headings list, which is designed to provide access to a database of bibliographical records of nonprint, educational media. A preface discusses the issues that led to a revamping of the subject headings,…

Discusses the integration of knowledge and how librarians can help achieve integration through various information access tools. The use of subject headings and descriptors in different indexes is described, the use of specialized tools versus more general tools is discussed, and examples are provided. (Contains nine references.) (LRW)

This set of papers offers insights into some of the major developments in the field of classification and knowledge organization, and highlights many of the fundamental changes in views and theories which have taken place during the last 40 years. This document begins with a series of reminiscences from former delegates of the first International…

This book examines what has been done in providing subject access to networked resources. The first chapter provides a historical overview of information services, developments in information technology, end users, and the Internet, as well as a discussion of the library response to these developments. The second chapter discusses metadata,…

Argues that indexing and classification schemes rely on an understanding of "subject" and discusses several different conceptions of subject as epistemological positions. It is further argued that a theory of subject must be based in a theory of knowledge, and a theory based on a realistic/materialistic epistemology is proposed. (39…

An investigation was conducted to determine whether proposed changes would improve end-user understanding of subdivided Library of Congress Subject Headings. Demographics, library use, and searching knowledge were considered from 63 end-users and 6 professional catalogers who answered questionnaires. Tables and figures display results. (Contains…

Reviews and analyzes selected Web sites that use standard library classification schemes or controlled vocabularies to enhance access to Web information sources. Profiles common elements of many sites and the structural and navigational approaches incorporated with select sites. Includes an appendix of sites that use standard classification…

Discussion of subject access points in databases concentrates on the broader theoretical perspective. Topics include technology-driven stages in the development of subject access points; a taxonomy of subject access points; document titles; abstracts; references and citations; full text; and descriptors, identifiers, classification codes, and…

The emphasis of this text is that the problems of information retrieval are the intellectual ones of subject analysis and description. These problems are not easily solved by technology alone, although certain inroads are being made by knowledge-based expert systems and other computer aids to indexing. Linguistic approaches are also showing…

Explores aspects of information retrieval complexity, specifically the demands on users and information systems, using a proposed query as an example. Discusses previous writings on subject access, search strategies and retrieval potential, and classification as a retrieval tool. An appendix shows the subject headings assigned to books in a…

This paper examines how the nature of the World Wide Web and characteristics of networked resources affect subject access and analyzes the requirements of effective indexing and retrieval tools. The current and potential uses of existing tools and possible courses of future development are explored in the context of recent research. The first…

This paper argues that as the number of concordance lines presented to researchers increases in line with ever-growing corpus size, the automatic selection of the most central lines will become more important. A method will be presented for selecting the most representative members from a set of concordance lines on the basis of repeated lexical…

Reports on the methodology used in an experiment whose objective was to discover whether information seekers display experimentally demonstrable preferences for index terms with particular properties, and if so, to analyze those preferences. Results provide strong evidence that it is possible to measure human preference for index terms.…

Presents a model for the design of online catalog subject access based on three principles: the uncertainty of subject indexing, the need for greater variety in searcher's queries, and the complexity of the search process. The proposed system is based on existing Library of Congress subject cataloging. (EM)

Describes a study that investigated the value of various access points in online catalog records by determining their usefulness to searchers who requested location information for items. Results of a transaction log analysis of the Illinois Library Computer Systems Office online union catalog for 45 academic libraries are discussed. (LRW)