|
Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The field of subject analysis enjoyed a flurry of interest in the 1970s, and has recently become a focus of attention again. The scholarly community doing work in this area has become more diffuse, and has grown to include new groups, such as information architects. Changes in information services and information seeking have led to reexamination of the nature and role of subject analysis tools and practices. This selective review looks at thesauri, guided navigation, and folksonomy as three activity areas in which subject analysis researchers have been attempting to address rapidly changing new environments.
INTRODUCTION
The 1970s were exciting years for those involved in subject analysis--a term used broadly here to encompass indexing, classification, thesaurus construction, and related "manual" or intellectual means of identifying topical content. Similarly, the late 1990s saw a resurgence in interest that continues to the present day. Though the study of subject analysis was hardly dormant in the intervening years, these two time periods serve as anchors for the following voyage through the scholarly literature and activities of a field in which F. W. Lancaster has played such an important role. This voyage is not a guided tour with stops at all possible points of interest, and is not intended as a state of the art review of all things to do with subject analysis (for these, see Lancaster, Elliker, & Connell, 1989; Markey & Miksa, 1987; McIlwaine & Williamson, 1999; Schwartz & Eisenmann, 1986; and Williamson, 1983, as well as Markey's [2006] extremely thorough review of the role of library classification per se and in online systems). This is instead a somewhat personal journey, selecting some areas of interest to illustrate how basic concepts and practices affect and are affected by new settings.
THE 1970S
In 1973, after a year of library and information science (LIS) core curriculum in cataloging and reference, Lancaster's Vocabulary Control for Information Retrieval (1972) offered to this budding librarian the perfect springboard to an expanded vision of subject analysis. Recommended by a mentor professor, Vocabulary Control was the first LIS textbook I purchased and read for pleasure rather than for a course. The sparse efficient (occasionally acerbic) writing and the assumption of reader intelligence contributed to its appeal, but the real excitement derived from the breadth of coverage and exposure to new ways of looking at subject languages and their role in online systems. In this influential text, Lancaster draws from a broad and deep understanding of machine-based as well as intellectual methods, and so it also served as an excellent invitation to explore automated information discovery more deeply. While information retrieval (IR) is outside the scope of this article, it is worth noting that the same era saw the publication of noteworthy IR texts by scholars such as Salton (1971), Sparck Jones (1971), Sparck Jones & Kay (1973), Van Rijsbergen (1975), and Vickery (1973).
In a further embarrassment of riches, many other significant publications and new editions of classics in subject analysis appeared in LIS book collections around that time, including:
* the first edition of Thesaurus Construction and Use (Aitchison & Gilchrist, 1972);
* the proceedings of the first Informatics conference (Aslib Coordinate Indexing Group, 1974);
* the first PRECIS manual (Austin, 1974);
* the fourth, and last, edition of Indexes and Indexing (Collison, 1972);
* the second edition of The Subject Approach to Information (Foskett, 1972);
* The Thesaurus in Retrieval (Gilchrist, 1971);
* Classification in the 1970s (Maltby, 1972);
* the magnum opus Indexing Languages and Thesauri (Soergel, 1974); and
* An Introduction to Chain Indexing (Wilson, 1971).
What accounts for this flurry of subject analysis activity in the 1970s? Obviously some of it can be attributed to the increasing availability and affordability of computers that could at last be used to create and manipulate bibliographic data. A decade earlier, most of the researchers who gathered at the seminal 1964 Symposium on Statistical Association Methods for Mechanized Documentation (Stevens, 1966), had to deal in the hypothetical or use very small test sets; by the mid-1970s machine-readable collections large enough for reasonable exploration were on hand to support research. These technological advances also meant that large interactive online bibliographic databases were beginning to be available for application in cataloging and reference services. While the use of these was at the time restricted to staff (in the case of machine-readable catalogs) or search intermediaries (in the case of online reference searching), these systems made it possible to imagine and investigate tools and methods, which might be different from those used by card catalogs and printed indexing services, and in particular to reexamine subject analysis models, mechanisms, and techniques.
Another characteristic of this era was that the LIS world had not yet become overly specialized in its gathering places. For the researcher interested in subject analysis today, conference presentation and travel funding resources must be allocated among three digital libraries conferences, several special interest group conferences of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) and its annual information architecture...
|
