1 SUBJECT ACCESS INF 389F: Organization of Records Information Professor Fran Miksa October 29, 2003

2 What Does the Phrase “Subject Access” Mean?—Pre-1890s—I  Subject Access associated with Classification of Knowledge (i.e., with a classificatory structure of subjects)  Subjects are the products of human mental discovery  Subjects are socially established and are naturally classified  Kinds of subjects (General—Concrete—Individual)— where “specific” means most concrete  Chief value—subjects considered part of a grand structure of knowledge

3 What Does the Phrase “Subject Access” Mean?—Pre-1890s—II  Subjects and IEs  IEs “treat” a subject  IEs have “themes” but these themes are of a “treated” subject  Virtually all “Subject Access” up to 1850s is based on the association of subjects as elements of classifications of knowledge

4 Classification of Knowledge and an IE

5 What Does the Phrase “Subject Access” Mean?—1890s-1950  Shift towards equating “subject” with document content  Library cataloging (1890s-present)  Document has a subject like a human being has a personality  Forcefulness of Card Catalog format  Documentation (1890s—1920s—1950s)  A document has many “subjects”  Subject = a “topic” (where topic is a word/term denoting where in a document some idea is mentioned)  Attempts to keep subject structures intact.

6 Classification of Knowledge and IEs as Sources of Subjects

7 What Does the Phrase “Subject Access” Mean?—III  1960s—  The computer revolution  Documentation becomes ISAR  Perceived “bottleneck” & Automatic indexing  Atomization of subjects & the loss of structure  Position of other traditions of practice

8 The Complications Raised by Other IE Features  Medium of IE  Presentation format & Genre  Audience & Use  Complex subjects/Compound subjects  Physics of music; Sociological aspects of sports; History of Chemistry  Physics in India; Sports in 20th century England  Combinations of subjects & Other features of IEs  Dictionary of the physics of music  Humorous aspects of sports [i.e. an essay]  Children’s book of sports stories

9 Content Access Attributes  Generator of content  Topicality of content (“Aboutness”? “Of-ness”?)  Form (of presentation) & Genre (“in-ness”) of content  Audience & Use (“for-ness”) of content  Relationships of content with other “contents”  Same content  Augmented content  Transformed content (Essentially the same— Essentially different and therefore a new content)

10 Content Attribute Issues  Natural language vs. Controlled vocabulary  Automatic extraction vs. Manual assignment  Questions related to Structure  No structure—Minimal structure—Extensive structure  Structural relationships

11 Structural Relationships  Ordinate structure  Superordinate - Coordinate - Subordinate  Chains; Arrays  Kinds  Equivalence  Hierarchical  Generic  Part  Instance  Associative  Thesaurus relators: BT, NT, RT, Use/Used for

12 Methods for Identifying and Employing Content Attributes  Automatic extraction (if text is digital)  Read/study an IE  Gather clues  Clues from the IE itself (Title page; Table of contents; Index; Illustrations, etc.)  Clues from outside the IE itself (Container; Reviews; Reference works, etc.)  Convert Findings to Vocabulary of a Given System.

13 Subject Structures  Value related to purpose  Formats of:  Alphabetical only  Alphabetical with term relationships (Thesauri; Topic maps?)  Systematic  Ontologies of domains  Hierarchical taxonomies Straight hierarchies Faceted structures

14 Classical Library Taxonomies  Dewey Decimal Classification (1876- )  Universal Decimal Classification (1895-  Library of Congress Classification (1898- )  Bibliographic Classification (1 st version, ; BC2, )  Colon Classification (1933- )  BBK (Russian) (1955- )