Choice and Forms of Headings (ISO 999)
1. Personal Names
• full form as possible
• should take the form used in the document, but if the text is
not consistent, the indexer should adopt one form
• choose the most recent, or the most commonly used form of
personal name as the heading and add “see” crossreferences from other forms,
e.g. Clemens, Samuel Langhorne see Twain, Mark
• where surnames are in common used, the entry should be
the surname followed by any given name or initials
• Where surnames are not used, the name that
customarily comes first should properly be used as the
entry word
e.g. Imran Khan
• Persons identified only by a given name or forename
should be indexed under that name, qualified if necessary,
by a title of office or other distinguishing epithet
e.g.
Leonardo da Vinci
Boudicca, Queen of Iceni
• Persons normally identified by a title of honor or nobility
should be indexed under that title, expanded if necessary
by their family name
e.g.
Dalai Lama
First Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill
• Compound and multiple surnames, whether hyphenated
or not, should be indexed under the first part
e.g.
Layzell Ward, Patricia
Perez de Cueller, Javier
2. Corporate Bodies
• Names of the corporate bodies should normally be indexed
without transposition
e.g. British Museum
• Transposition may, however, be used if it is considered that
this would help the users of the index.
e.g. Department of Agriculture see Agriculture, Department of
J. Whitaker & Sons see Whitaker (J) & Sons
• Choose the most recent or the most commonly used form of
corporate name as the main heading and add “see” cross
references from other forms
e.g. John Moores University see Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool John Moores University
3. Geographic Names
• should be full as necessary for clarity, with additions to
avoid confusion with the otherwise identical names
e.g
Alaminos (Laguna)
Alaminos (Pangasinan)
• An article or preposition should be retained in a
geographic name of which it forms an integral part
e.g. La Paz
Las Vegas
• Where the article or preposition does not form an integral
part of a name it should be omitted, e.g.
e.g
New Forest rather than The New Forest
Rheinfall
rather than
Der Rheinfall
4. Titles of documents
• should normally be italicized, underlined or otherwise distinguished.
If necessary for identification, names of creators, places of publication
dates or other qualifiers may be added within parenthesis.
Ave Maria (Gounod)
Ave Maria (Schubert)
Ave Maria (Verdi)
e.g.
• In an English index, articles in titles are conventionally
transposed to the end of the heading so that filing order is explicit.
e.g.
Hunting of the Snark, The
Kapital, Das
• A preposition at the beginning of the title should be retained
e.g.
To the Lighthouse
5. First lines of poems
Conventionally in an index of first lines of poems, the
article is retained without transposition and is recognized
for purpose of alphabetical arrangement

e.g.
A little thing in the snow
The modest Rose puts forth a thorn
Evaluation of Indexes
Guidelines/Criteria
1. Subject error
•Errors in choosing subject descriptors
•Omission errors
•Use of a too broad or too narrow term
2. Generic searching – Alphabetical indexes have always
presented difficulties in promoting generic searching.
3. Terminology
4. Internal guidance
• Cross-references
• Printed instruction on how to use the index
5. Accuracy in referring
• Bibliographic citation
• Cross-references
6. Entry scattering
Example:
College libraries School libraries
National libraries
Public libraries
Special libraries
7. Entry differentiation
Example:
Libraries, 1-2, 28-31, 42, 53-60, 82, 109-11, 131-40, 310, 342-50
8. Spelling and punctuation
9. Filing
•
•
Letter by letter (Air base, Airborne, Air brake)
Word by word (Air base, Airborne, Air brake)
10. Layout
•
•
•
Main heading are in heavy print
Subheadings are in lighter print and small letters and
indented
See references are italicized
11. Length and type
•
Index length should be 3-5% of the pages of a typical
nonfiction book, about 5-8% for a history or biography and
about 15-20% for reference books
12. Cost
13. Standards
Automatic Indexing
• refers to indexing by machine, or the
analysis of text by means of computer
algorithms. The focus is on automatic
methods used behind the scenes with little
or no input from individual searchers, with
the exception of relevance feedback.
Four Types of Approaches
(Cleveland & Cleveland, 2001, p. 211)
• Statistical – based on counts of words,
statistical associations, and collation
techniques that assigns weighs, cluster
similar words
• Syntactical – stresses grammar and parts of
speech, identifying concepts found in
designated grammatical combinations, such
as noun phrases.
• Semantic systems – concerned with the context
sensitivity of words in the text. What does cat
mean in terms of its context? House cats? Heavy
earthmoving equipment?
• Knowledge-based – systems goes beyond
thesaurus or equivalent relationships to knowing
the relationship between words, e.g. ‘tibia’ is part
of a leg, thus the document is indexed under ‘leg
injuries’.
Human /Manual Indexing vs. Automatic
Indexing
•
•
•
•
•
Needs more people
Costly
Human error
Low in production
Quality can range from
excellent to appalling
• Needs less human effort
• Cheaper
• Follows instruction
automatically
• Accurate
• Fast in production
• Promotes meticulous
problem analysis
• Dependent to human
intelligence
• Power lies on how the
computer is programmed
Human /Manual Indexing vs. Automatic Indexing
• Automatic methods have trouble handling
synonyms, homonyms, and semantic relations.
Conceptualizing is very poor.
• Human indexers go through cognitive processes
that may be influenced by their background
experience, education, training, intelligence, and
common sense.
• Computers can, and humans cannot, organize all
words in a text and in a given database and make
statistical operations on them
Indexing and the Internet
Search Tools
• Search engines - Engines are computer software that scan the Web
and select pages to be indexed for the searching system. They are
often referred to as Web indexes since they examine the content of the
web pages. Examples: HotBot, InfoSeek, and Google.
• Directory-based systems – usually indexed by human and thus tend to
have a higher level of quality in the indexing. Indexing may be based on
full text or on most frequently used words since the way the material
is organized is a sense of browsing that is similar to traditional library
browsing. Examples: Yahoo! Directory and Google Directory
• Metasearchers - allow the user to search across multiple search tools
at once. They take user’s query and submit it to a number of other
search tools. Examples: Metacrawler and Surfmax