SUBJECT ACCESS

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SUBJECT ACCESS

• INF 389F Organization of Records Information
• Professor Fran Miksa
• October 29, 2003

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What Does the Phrase Subject Access
Mean?Pre-1890sI

• 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 (GeneralConcreteIndividual)wh
  ere specific means most concrete
• Chief valuesubjects considered part of a grand
  structure of knowledge

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What Does the Phrase Subject Access
Mean?Pre-1890sII

• 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

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Classification of Knowledge and an IE
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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 (1890s1920s1950s)
• 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.

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Classification of Knowledge and IEs as Sources of
Subjects
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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

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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
• Childrens book of sports stories

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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
  sameEssentially different and therefore a new
  content)

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Content Attribute Issues

• Natural language vs. Controlled vocabulary
• Automatic extraction vs. Manual assignment
• Questions related to Structure
• No structureMinimal structureExtensive
  structure
• Structural relationships

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Structural Relationships

• Ordinate structure
• Superordinate - Coordinate - Subordinate
• Chains Arrays
• Kinds
• Equivalence
• Hierarchical
• Generic
• Part
• Instance
• Associative
• Thesaurus relators BT, NT, RT, Use/Used for

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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.

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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

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Classical Library Taxonomies

• Dewey Decimal Classification (1876- )
• Universal Decimal Classification (1895-
• Library of Congress Classification (1898-
  )
• Bibliographic Classification (1st version,
  1933-1960 BC2, 1960- )
• Colon Classification (1933- )
• BBK (Russian) (1955- )