Subjective Reality and the Indexing Process

Indexing schemes are largely similar in their outputs – the right answer to many questions, such as ‘controlled vs. non-controlled,’ how many terms to use, and how expressive or deep the vocabulary should be are all matters of indexing policy considered on a per-collection basis and more or less well-defined in the specification (ISO, 1985). The biggest difference in indexing methods is whether they have an objective or subjective view of the world. Much of the difference between methods after that comes down to how objectively or subjectively they view the world, and what the right approach to dealing with that is.

The most subjective approach to indexing is ‘social indexing,’ which makes no assumptions about underlying reality beneath the words it uses for indexing, and in fact many of the original proponents of it as a method felt that this was a benefit, because each user may mean something different by tags (Guy & Tonkin, January 2006). Folksonomy proponents are backing down from this extreme approach over time, but denying a possible shared reality is as far towards subjective as possible.
A large distinction is between document-oriented and request-oriented indexing, with document-oriented indexing using the properties of the document to describe the document and request-oriented indexing considering what the likely requests of the user community are likely to be (Fidel, 1994). Another formulation of request-oriented indexing is tying indexing to supporting the information-seeking behavior of the users; indexing in this sense is about making it possible for users to find documents that satisfy their information needs (Hjørland, 1997).

Document-oriented indexing and request-oriented indexing are present in all collections to various extent. In general, the more general the collection (the broader the scope of the collection and of the population the collection serves), the more oriented on the properties of the document itself the indexer has to be. This is because the broader the scope of the collection, the less adapted the indexing can be to particular topics. Both the depth of indexing and specificity of meaning of terms have to be limited in a more general collection. (Hjørland, 1997) For a collection more limited in scope, more attention can be paid to supporting the sorts of requests that will be coming in from a user community. (Fidel, 1994; Swift, Winn, & Bramer, 1979) Document-oriented indexing is more objective than request-oriented indexing, because it presupposes (or at least pretends) that there is a single reality that the documents are being described in relation to. Request-oriented indexing is more subjective, because it admits the concept of communities of practice (or discourse communities) with their own conceptions of the world (Hjørland, 1997; Mai, 2001).

The process of indexing is in fact more subjective than this, because the subjectivity of the indexer must be taking into account – there is a series of interpretations that the indexer makes in moving from text to a representation in the subject index(es) (Mai, 2001). The indexers’ interpretation can be informed by the domain, which is called domain-centered indexing. When analyzing a document, domain-centered indexing starts with an analysis of the domain and then moves on to the users’ needs (and indexer interpretation) and then role of the document with regards to these (Mai, 2005).

Indexing approaches vary in a number of ways, but one of the most important is how subjective their view of the world is, and how granular that subjectivity is. Document-centered indexing is least granular (most objective), with a single representation claiming to serve all needs; after that is domain indexing, which considers documents in light of their role in a domain (although other information is taken into effect.) User (or request)-oriented indexing considers the information needs of the users as primary, assuming that the users of the catalog have specific purposes in mind for the catalog. Democratic indexing goes further in assuming the fragmentation of reality, assuming that there isn’t consensus in meaning among users, except possibly in aggregate.

For indexing practice, which of these methods should be considered is tied to the collection. The more focused a collection on particular users or domains, the more tied to requests or domain analysis the collection can be. The more general the collection, the more likely it is to need an assertion that there is a single objective view of reality (document-centered) or that there isn’t a meaningful consensus (social-indexing) – and the decision between document-centered and social-indexing may be more usefully made on other means, like whether the collection is developed (like a library or a set of resources chosen for a purpose) or arbitrary (like pages taken off the web.)

bibliography

• Fidel, R. (1994). User-Centered Indexing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45 (8), 572-576.
• Guy, M., & Tonkin, E. (January 2006). Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? D-Lib Magazine, 12(1).
• Hjørland, B. (1997). Chapter 2: Subject Searching and Subject Representation Data. In Information Seeking and Subject Representation: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Information Science (pp. 11-37). Westport, CT: Greenwood.
• ISO. (1985). 5963: Documentation — Methods for Examining Documents, Determining their Subjects and Selecting Indexing Terms. (No. ISO 5963-1985): International Organization for Standardization.
• Mai, J.-E. (2001). Semiotics and Indexing: An Analysis of the Subject Indexing Process. Journal of Documentation, 57(5), 591-622.
• Mai, J.-E. (2005). Analysis in Indexing: Document and Domain Centered Approaches. Information Processing and Management, 41(3), 599-611.
• Swift, D. F., Winn, V. A., & Bramer, D. A. (1979). A Sociological Approach to the Design of Information Systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 30, 215-223.

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