INFO 4203 Vocabulary

To help with the midterm

Aboutness

the aboutness of a document goes beyond explicit words in the test to a higher level of meaning

Abstract

a condensed, representative surrogate of a knowledge record. A narrative description of document, which may include pertinent data and critical comments

Book Indexes

indexes to the content of individual monograph publications. These usually appear at the end of the book and are alphabetic, including subjects and name terms

Boolean Searching

the procedure of identifying on “yes” or “no” binary bias

Concept List

a list of words representing the ideas in a knowledge record not yet translated into the formal indexing vocabulary

Controlled Vocabulary

a vocabulary in which only an approved list of words can be used as index terms; used to manage synonyms and near-synonyms and to bring together semantically related terms

Document

the physical carrier of organized information; may be print or non-print

Entropy

a measure of the thermal energy in a system per unit of temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work

Exhaustivity

the range of a topic coverage of an indexed document

Extract

a form of abstract that is contracted by stringing together verbatim sentences from the document

Free Text Vocabulary

an uncontrolled vocabulary in which any word in the natural language is permissible

Heading

one or more terms representing a topic in an index

Index

a guide to the contents of a knowledge record; a systematic analysis of such records, arranged in an organized way; a list of bibliographic information arranged in order according to some specified datum such as author, subject, or topic keyword

Information Entropy

a measure of the uncertainty in an information source; information is always a measure of the decrease of uncertainty at a receiver; information and entropy complement each other in that information decreases uncertainty, which is measured by entropy

Information Retrieval

the techniques of storying and retrieving recorded knowledge; specifically, it is the process of selecting information from databases, using a variety of access points, such as subjects or authors; the selected recall of recorded information

Keyword

a word from the natural language of a document that is considered significant for indexing

Metadata

data about data; structured information that describes, explains, and locates subunits of data

Precision

a quantitative ratio of the number of relevant documents retrieved to the total number of documents retrieved

Query

a formal inquiry to an information retrieval file

Recall

a quantitative ratio of the number of retrieved documents to the total number of relevant documents in a collection

Relevance

the measure of the degree to which retrieved information material satisfies the needs of the user

See Also Reference

a reference to another term or heading that is broader or narrower in the hierarchy of terms

See Reference

a reference from a nonpreferred term or heading to a term or heading that is used in its place

Specificity in Indexing

the degree to which a descriptor matches the exact meaning of the subject concept

Subheading

a secondary heading used to subdivide headings with many entries

Thesaurus

an authority file of terms that shows the full scope of each term along with its relationship to broader terms, narrower terms, and related terms

Uncontrolled Vocabulary

a list of terms derived directly from the text of a document

Vocabulary Control

A list of terms agreed on for use in indexing, along with rules of use

Trends that impact resource organizations and related best practices:

• Heterogeneous, multimedia contents instead of text documents

• Complex retrieval systems instead of matching queries and document representations

• Visualization of the information space instead of a ranked list of search results

• Human information behavior instead of information needs

• Users as both creators and consumers of information instead of one or the other

• Misinformation and disinformation instead of truth and accurate information

• Deployment of new cataloging standards in libraries, including RDA (Resource Description and Access) and the exposure of RDA based data in the linked data cloud instead of traditional cataloging tools such as MARC

• AI-powered search engines instead of traditional information retrieval and search engines

Document-Oriented Approach

claims that indexing summarizes or represents the content of a document

User-Oriented Approach

requires that indexing reflect the requests for which a document might be relevant

Broad Steps for Indexing and Abstracting a Document

1. Analyze the document,

2. Describe the subject, and

3. Translate into the indexing language.