With the proliferation of electronic textual resources and digital images, indexing and abstracting have become increasingly important topics for the information society. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a society without such artifacts as indexes and abstracts, which provide access points to the massive amount of information that permeates our lives and help us make informed decisions on the relevance of the information. This book offers a comprehensive account of the theory, techniques, and methods used in indexing and abstracting from the point of view of a wide range of disciplines including library and information science and computer science. This book is structured in two parts: in Part I "Theory, Principles, and Applications," (17 chapters) the theoretical foundations are introduced, and in Part II, "Practice," (2 chapters) several exercises are presented as a complement to Part I. This book contains comprehensive references to past research and case studies along with references to new research and applications. Special treatment is given to the issue of how indexing and abstracting are affected by new technology trends such as the Internet and multimedia systems. Lancaster not only describes the different approaches to abstracting, indexing, and related topics, but he also gives his critical comments on each of the works he presents, identifying limitations when necessary. This volume starts with a note on terminology where Professor Lancaster discusses terminology misuse in information retrieval, a consequence of ignoring past work by newcomers to the field. Two appendixes provide abstracting guidelines and an example of modular content analysis. This volume contains a back-of-the-book three-column index that provides useful access to specific concepts and authors.
Chapter 1, "Introduction" states the main purpose of indexing and abstracting: to construct representations of published items in a form suitable for inclusion in some type of database. These representations can be produced by cataloging, indexing, or abstracting procedures. Lancaster illustrates indexing/abstracting within the framework of information retrieval activities that involve document selection, document description and storage, and document search and retrieval. The chapter concludes by introducing precision and recall metrics for measuring performance of searches in a database.
Chapter 2, "Indexing Principles" details the steps involved in subject indexing: conceptual analysis and translation. Conceptual analysis involves deciding what the document is about (or covers). Translation involves the conversion of the conceptual analysis into a set of indexing terms. Lancaster highlights the relevance of the audience in the process of conceptual analysis. The topic of "aboutness" is discussed in detail in this chapter with many references to past work; however, he takes a pragmatic view by saying that conceptual analysis is nothing more than identifying the topics discussed by an author or represented in a document. Lancaster identifies two forms of translation: by extraction and by assignment. While translation by extraction involves the use of terms from the source document, translation by assignment relies on the use of some kind of controlled vocabulary Book Reviews