Elaine Svenonius

Unanswered Questions in the Design of Controlled Vocabularies.

The issue of free-text versus controlled vocabulary is examined in this article. The history of the issue, which is seen as beginning with the debate over title term indexing in the last century, is reviewed and then attention is turned to questions which have not been satisfactorily addressed by previous research. The point is made that these questions need to be answered if we are to design retrieval tools, such as thesauri, upon a rational basis.

Access to nonbook materials: the limits of subject indexing for visual and aural languages

An examination of some nonbook materials with respect to an aboutness model of indexing leads to the conclusion that there are instances that defy subject indexing. These occur not so much because of the nature of the medium per se but because it is being used for nondocumentary purposes, or, where being used for such purposes, the subject referenced is nonlexical.

LCSH: Semantics, Syntax and Specificity

SUMMARY This paper looks at changes affecting LCSH over its 100-year history. Adopting a linguistic conceptualization, it frames these changes as relating to the semantics, syntax and pragmatics of the LCSH language. While its category semantics has remained stable over time, the LCSH relational semantics underwent a significant upheaval when a thesaural structure was imposed upon its traditional See and See also structure. Over time the LCSH syntax has become increasingly complex as it has moved from being largely enumerative to in large part synthetic. Until fairly recently the LCSH pragmatics consisted of only one rule, viz, the injunction to assign specific headings. This rule, always controversial, has become even more debated and interpreted with the move to the online environment.

Automatic recognition of title page names

Abstract The general question addressed by the study concerns the feasibility of developing automatic name recognition algorithms to distinguish character strings representing names from other character strings occurring on English language title pages. To answer the question, two name recognition algorithms were tested: one to recognize personal names and the other corporate names. The algorithms involved matching title page names with names in authority files and identifying postname markers. The success rates for the corporate and personal name algorithms were 85.8% and 84.5%, respectively, with a precision rate of 89.3% for the latter. The corporate name algorithm worked significantly better for public as opposed to university library data. The personal name algorithm worked significantly better for names deemed to be useful access points in retrieval. The personal name algorithm, further, resulted in significantly higher precision for the public library data, as well as for names that were useful access points. It is anticipated that the algorithms could be even more nearly perfected by increasing the number of names in the authority files, especially names of publishers, colleges, and universities. The findings offer cautious promise for alleviating some of the labor intensive work of cataloging by providing a means for automatically recognizing names on title pages.

Automatic derivation of name access points in cataloging

This article reports the results of research designed to explore the feasibility of automatically deriving name access points from machine‐readable title pages of English language monographs. Two questions were asked: (1) To what degree is it possible to specify formal criteria for extracting from the title pages of monographs in machine‐readable form the names of those persons and corporate bodies who have contributed significantly to the creation of the monographs in question? and (2) Are title page data adequate for automatically generating name access points from English language monographs in machine‐readable form? Results show that approximately 88% of the access points selected by the Library of Congress or the National Library of Medicine could be automatically derived from title page data. These results have implications for the design of bibliographic standards and online catalogs.

Millennium Project Research Agenda: Cataloging and Classification

would it look like? Would you like to see a consensus on operational definitions of concepts? Or, what would you really like to know that the research literature does not currently cover (that is, whats the state of our knowledge and where would you like to go)? The following responses come from Elaine Svenonius, professor emerita of UCLAs Department of Information Studies; co-contributors Joan Mitchell, of OCLCs Forest Press and Diane Vizine-Goetz of OCLCs Office of Research (for the full-length, unabridged version of their response, please see the OCLC Forest Press research and development agenda for classification available at http://www.oclc. org/oclc/fp/research/agenda.htm); la Mcllwaine, professor of the University College Londons School of Library, Archive and Informa-