Christina's LIS Rant
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Some quotes from the 1962 volume of American Documentation
I love when off site storage sends me the whole volume instead of just an article through ILL. I wanted to check on Taylor's article on questions [*] and I was flipping through...
[*] Taylor, R. S. (1962). Process of asking questions. American Documentation, 13(4), 391-396.
-- wow, the whole visceral, conscious, formalized, compromised thing references Perry 1961? ¶ 4:24 PM| |cites (technorati) |
- an LC project for NSF figured that there were 30-35K journals in the world (which is about the number I've heard recently, but there's been 'an explosion' in the number of journals)(Bourne, p.160)
- an article on the retrieval of information from medical records (Alberson & Kinkaid, n1, p.83)
- "relevancy and pertinency in indexing" (Rees, n1, p93)
- "patent indexing using links and roles" (Montague, n1, p104)
- "semantic information" (Mahoney, n3, p276)
- "the information system: too big and growing" (Schultz, n3, p288) "available equipment and procedures exhibit little prospect of coping successfully with the dynamic problems of information generation, transmission, and use created by the current scientific and technological 'explosion'"
- Ha! Judging of relevance by titles -- about 50% (I'd been saying 40%, but I guess that's from another study) (Montgomery & Swanson, "Machinelike indexing by people" p359)
- "A plan to reduce costs of technical library operations in the Department of Defense" (Langenbeck, n3, 295) (suggests cataloging in publication by producers of technical reports)
- a citation of the famous Memex article :)
- many, if not most of the authors were from for-profit companies!
- "there is today no generally accepted method of comparing the effectiveness of different types of indexes. The needs of index users vary so greatly that even the most carefully planned test of retrieval efficiency can be challenged. An index which is perfect for one user can be almost worthless for another who has different needs... there are more and more indications that most indexing systems can be made to produce essentially the same degree of effectiveness. The real test is how well a given system serves its intended users..." (goes on to talk of exhaustivity issues, etc.)(Markus, n1, p16)
- word co-occurrence for indexing -- an association map based on Pearson Correlation Coefficients (Doyle, p.382)
[*] Taylor, R. S. (1962). Process of asking questions. American Documentation, 13(4), 391-396.
-- wow, the whole visceral, conscious, formalized, compromised thing references Perry 1961? ¶ 4:24 PM| |cites (technorati) |
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