Subject indexing
The books in the Andrén collection are indexed according to subject. This means that the books are given indexing terms which describe the form and contents of the book. The purpose is to make it easier to search the collection. Two students of Library and Information Science at Lund University were commissioned to carry out the subject indexing of the Andrén collection. They wrote their master?s thesis on how to perform the subject indexing of a special collection like the Andrén collection. The purpose of the thesis was to make a survey of the theoretical and practical perspectives available in subject indexing. The authors formulated a model for subject indexing the Andrén collection.
The process of subject indexing is divided into two steps. The first step is to analyse the relevant document's content, which means getting acquainted with the document and deciding what it is about. The second step is to translate the content analysis into indexing terms. This amouts to determining which subjects and aspects of subjects are relevant and selecting the appropriate terms.
A checklist with has been set up to remind indexer of characteristics that are important to look for in the document. Consistency is essential in subject indexing; this means that a subject is described by the same term regardless of the terms used in the document. The indexing terms are selected from a controlled vocabulary, a thesaurus, which has directions to preferred synonyms.
The thesis is available in pdf-format (in Swedish only). The model used for the subject indexing of the Andrén collection is thoroughly described in a manual.
Ansvarig för sidan: Ingrid Borg