Search of Knowledge (Tables of Contents and Indexes)
Meral Alakuş (Dahousie University)
Looking into the future and realizing the fast accumulation of knowledge specially during the last century and to these days, it is obvious that controlling knowledge will be the most crucial problem people will have to deal with in the coming years. Coping with the information explosion will be the responsibility of “Knowledge and/or Information Managers,” e.g. librarians and indexers, subject specialists and researchers as well as computer scientists. Organizing knowledge will be carried through analytic study of content matter, topics and subtopics will be identified with keywords; personal and other names will also be given just as they are recorded in the text, indicating relationships between them and showing page / location numbers. All this is done with the help of human intellect formulating and rearranging content matter under “Tables of Contents and Index”. Same rules are applied to books, journals, reports and other recorded materials, print or virtual. It is rightly claimed by the British Council Information Centre that “for the organization of information and of documents, the contribution of technology in comparison to human intellect, is 85% to 15% in favour of intellect.” In this paper, in search of knowledge, I endeavour to explore the uses of two traditional tools made available in the publishing world: namely the “Book Index” and “Table of Contents. It certainly seems that indexing will never disappear as long as knowledge in various formats grows and expands; in application, it might require different ways to approach the full content, which is in fact content analysis and defining topics with keywords. With the continuing increases in computer processing and storage capabilities, the barriers to and benefits of electronic access to more information content are becoming serious issues in information science research.
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IN SEARCH OF KNOWLEDGE
(Tables of Contents and Indexes)
Information as a future prospect:
The domain
of Information Management will be one of
the most important fields of study
for many years to come. It will also prevail as one of the most significant disciplines so as to consider it
as a means for raising humanity
from a cultural decline into a “just society” in the near future. This is only
possible through fair sharing of knowledge and production for all people. Where people are allowed to receive a good
formal public education, they will also be able to enhance themselves through exposure to free
knowledge in libraries and enjoy being happy citizens of “Knowledge Society”.
Looking into the future and
realizing the fast accumulation of knowledge
specially during the last century and to these days, it is obvious that
controlling knowledge will be the most
crucial and and the foremost problem people will have to deal with in the coming years. In this paper, in search
of knowledge, I endeavor to explore the uses of two traditional tools made
available to us in the publishing world:
namely the “Book Index” and “Table of Contents. Both of these
tools are good reasons for researchers
for preferring books which include an index and at the same time with properly classified “Table of Contents”
pages. As examined in this article, it is obvious that
without these tools added as parts to the books, the structure of a book will
not be complete and its value will not
be fully comprehended. With these tools,
readers are led to the right information both in print books and/or e-books,
and even on internet searches; it is the responsibility of knowledge workers to
act as a medium between the people and the materials.
Knowledge Doubling:
“Knowledge” is what
has been acquired through education and
learning, by putting facts and experiences together in order to
understand a subject or help others to understand a subject. As also defined in
the Webster’s dictionary, knowledge is the act and state of understanding; in fact it is also something gained and preserved by knowing,
recording and preserving through culture and civilization. Knowledge is also
explaining a subject in full content. On
the other hand, “Information” implies facts and data concerning a specific
subject of study.
Until
the beginnings of 20th century, e.g. 1900s, knowledge doubled approximately every century; this was so observed in the “Knowledge Doublin
Curve” created by Buckminster Fuller. Then
by the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years, but now on
average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. To add to this, according to IBM, what comes
out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of
knowledge every 12 hours. (Schilling,
2013) It is obvious that under these conditions, some solution had to be
brought, and the solution was to make space for more books in libraries with big collections. Considering the growth of knowledge
during the course of the last century, arranging books on shelves by size, seemed to be quite
a logical system, since technology will
bring forth new possibilities to retrieve knowledge organized in different
ways.
Knowledge
Organisation System: (KOS)
Knowledge Organisation has always
been for the purpose of providing the
right knowledge and information for researchers and readers when needed.
Management of “Information or Knowledge”
starts with organizing the content or
putting it together into a comprehensive organised structure, the text, which
will then become a
solution for retrieving
information from the contents, no matter what the format and type of material
one has to deal with. The statements
“Information Management and/or Knowledge Management” are used
in library literature, both meaning as “Content Management,” describing the subject
coverage of the book. In content management
there is an hierarchical order between ideas represented in the text going from
general topics to subtopics; there is
also relationships between various topics and subtopics discussed in varios
parts of the text.
Organization of the work or the
text itself, e.g. the content, is done by authors, scholars and encyclopaedists. However the tasks of the
information professionals are to make this knowledge (whether organised or
unorganised) available to those who seek it, e.g. to store it in an accessible
way, and to provide tools and procedures that make it easier for people to find
what they seek in those stores. What is now called “Knowledge Management,” in
its simplest forms, is in fact
Knowledge Organisation Systems
(KOS); after all, they are the “contents list and the index” of
textbooks (scholarly books) where
knowledge is covered in the text. The supplementary tools such as the content
list and/or the index help the readers
to find their way around the text. (Vickery, 2008)
How to cope with the information explosion will be the
responsibility of “Knowledge and/or Information Managers,” e.g. the librarians and the indexers. It doesn’t
seem that the growth of knowledge will
slow down in the next century. As Brett
King says, “The level and rate of change that we are
experiencing today is likely to accelerate over the next 50-100 years. We will
be undergoing periods of constant disruption this coming century, and the
disruption we face every 10-15 years, may be something our forebears only have
had to deal with during their entire lifetime.
(King, 2010)
Book Searching: Title Page
The above mentioned tools, e.g. “Table
of Contents and the Index” as solutions for easy retrieval of books from
stacks and for easy location of subjects and names mentioned in the text, are
already available in most books and are publication requirements for scholarly
books.
However, firstly, the Title Page of
a book, of a
thesis, report or any other
written and recorded work is the first section at the front and displays the
metadata items necessary to find the book, such as the author(s), editor, title
and series name. This is the Metadata Information, which designates the data
about the “data in search”. In addition
to the metadata information, the title page also displays the identity record
of that specific material, whatever the format, giving
its unique publication details, such as
the publisher, place, date, edition, vol., page numbers, etc. In cases when the
researcher or the user knows the metadata information of which material he
wants, given on its title page, location of the book or other materials is
easily recovered with the given classification number.
Subject headings added, also help to guide the
researchers to materials of the same subject kept together. In libraries, until the last two decades of 20th century, when knowledge
management was still done manually, all metadata information for each book was
written on 5x3 in. catalog cards, and
users found what they wanted by checking through the card catalog, putting down
the classification numbers, then looking for books in the stacks. These cards
were alphabetically arranged under authors’ names, titles of books, and subject
headings, etc.
A
study made in 1990, focusing not on
enhancement but rather on searching behavior of users, showed that:
“a number of instances of users going to the shelves, … taking books
down and looking at the table of contents and index, and then either replacing
the book or keeping it. When questioned … users often indicate that they are
attempting to find out if that book actually treats the subject in which they
are interested at all, or in any significant way. (Belkin et al.)
Book Searching: Tables of Contents
Thus,
it is logical to assume that when users have a chance to check these two
tools in a book they find in the stacks, they will easily be able to decide if
the book will be useful for them. This will be true, just as for print books,
also for non-print (PDF) materials, on line books and other recorded materials
to check and see them for making a selection. It will also be just as
convenient for users to approach copies of
“Table of Contents and the Back of the Book Index”, if and when they are
available on line. Functions
of these tools are to be considered as inseparable parts of all Scholarly Books
and no such book should be published without these parts.
“Table
of Contents” serves two purposes: It gives users an overview of the
document's contents and its organization, listing titles of chapters and their
page numbers. It also allows readers to go directly to a specific
section/subsection of a print or of an on-line document. Table of contents page takes place in the
very first section of the book, after the title page and before the foreword
and the preface. Usually called simply “Contents” and abbreviated
informally as “ToC”; it is in fact, a list of the chapters, under which subsections are given
at the front of a book or a report,
periodical, with commencing page numbers. If the sections of the book are written by
different authors, their names are also listed on the table of contents, after
each chapter and page numbers are indicated next to the heading.
One important
problem in relation to how the readers would decide which book they want, is
first to find the book to review; in
libraries this is possible with classification numbers to lead the user to the
right place in the stacks. When this is not possible, the solution will
be making copies of these two basic tools in books available for review -
namely Table of Contents and possibly Back of
the Book Index. The contents page represents a logical organization of
the text as written by the author responsible for the book.
Looking through a well designed ‘Table of Contents’ in a book, it is fair to say that it resembles a general
hierarchical order of the text covered in the book, which is a taxonomic structure of the organized
content covered in the book. Similarly, when we
think of taxonomy, it also makes us think
of an hierarchical classification system. Therefore,
table of contents can be interpreted as hierarchical taxonomies and be
defined as: “… a kind of controlled
vocabulary in which each term is connected to a designated broader term at the
top, with all other terms that are listed under the top level term, are
organized into a large hierarchical structure.
Taxonomy in this case could apply to a single large hierarchy or a
limited set of hierarchies.” (Hedden, 2010, p. 6) In selecting books, therefore, table of
contents will be the foremost component as a guide to explore the content of
the book and review it for further research. The next step would be to
refer to the back of the book index to navigate between the pages to find out
if the specific information is mentioned in the text
The other important advantages of both “Table of Contents and the Back of
the Book Index” could be using the topic names and the index keywords for
retrieving these books, which would describe the book exactly with the same
descriptors used by the author. This
would be much better than using
general subject headings assigned from thesauri or from other standard Subject
Headings Lists. In addition, these keywords may also
help retrieving books of similar subjects requested by the user, where authors
use similar free index terms or descriptors, but where those books are possibly
kept in different boxes or bins.
Book Searching: Indexes
Indexing is taking
information from the document and describing it with a key term or terms. An essential element in any index is the arrangement
of the entries according to known order,
usually an alphabetical order or a classified order under topics. An index takes the
researcher to the information in a document
to the exact information in books, journal articles, web sites,
databases, manuals, catalogs, a graphic images, compact or floppy disks,
microforms, etc. The purpose is to organize the content of document or a text so that topics, subtopics or names will be retrievable to the interested users
in an easy and quick way.
Hans Wellisch states in his book that an index is ‘an
alphabetically or otherwise ordered
arrangement of entries, different than the order of the material in the
indexed document’. In general,
most other definitions simply denote the
fact that “Indexes provide access to information, and that different types of indexes are also cited
according to their functions, such as, “Geographic
indexes, Name indexes, Legal Case indexes, Title indexes, Scientific Name
indexes, First-line indexes, Author indexes, Chemical indexes, Numeric indexes,
Melodic indexes, Citation indexes.” (Leise, 2008, p. 13)
Back of the Book Index, on the other hand, will guide
the reader to find specific topical or subtopical keywords to the exact page;
it will also point to the relationships between these appearing scattered in
various pages of the full text. When needed,
“see” references are used between related terms, where it becomes possible to
go to the specific pages where these relationships are mentioned. It is always
a good idea to check the index under keywords for specific topics and subtopics
alphabetically listed in the back of the book. In addition to these keywords,
names are also listed in alphabetical order for personal, geographic,
historical, or mythological names, etc. Back of the
Book Indexes are placed at the end of the book; in all book indexes the
keywords and names are taken from the content exactly just as used by the author in the text. In some books there may be two separate
indexes for subjects and names; otherwise all the subject keywords and names will
be given in one straight alphabetical list or in a clasified list, at the end
of the book.
Indexes to e-books are also useful
to locate information in the main text, checking keywords and names mentioned
in a similar manner. Both the Table of Contents and the Index will be available
online with the e-text, whereas for printed books,
the solution will be by attaching the “table of contents” and “index” pages in
full to the bibliographic entry, thus providing
complete metadata information
necessary for search. (Leise, 2008)
Back
of the book indexing and thesaurus creation are similar in that, back of the
book index is
not
just plain “indexing” it is also “index
creation,” and the design and creation of an index is not too different from
the design and creation of a thesaurus. It is different from most periodical
indexing, because periodical indexing usually relies on the use of pre-existing
terms in a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus.
(Hedden, Heather. Key words /
vol. 20, No. 2, p. 49) Therefore,
searching for articles from periodicals will be possible by using subject thesauri, where terms are
already available online for searching purposes; whereas index words are
selected and assigned by the indexer
from the book content itself.
Comparing indexes with table of contents, it seems more convenient to
oversee the full content coverage of the books from their tables of contents,
than it would be from an index of alphabetically arranged keywords. The book index rearranges the text into an alphabetical order of concepts,
where there is no logical flow of subjects from broader to narrower
topics listed. These keywords serve as locators to specific concepts in the
text; when looking for information on a certain subtopic or name of a special
person or geographic place, which may
not be mentioned on the title page, it is a big help to use the Back of the
Book Index to find out if these important facts are included text also in
making a book selection to borrow or to .
As stated by Mary Coe in her paper writes “ the fact is that there is need for further research on
print indexes to determine if they are useful or not, what the standards
they have; how the indexes help the
readers and if they lead the readers to the exact information they need; or how to determine the quality of
indexes; or if the inclusion of indexes becomes a factor influencing selection
of books for purchase; or even if the
publishers are to investigate what the indexes add to the use of the book; some
have taken steps towards this. The findings of researchers can provide useful
evidence for book indexers as well as
e-book indexes and how helpful they are.
In this paper, the author points
out that further user and usability studies are needed not only to inform
professional practice but to inform
other areas of information behaviour
research. (Coe, 2014)
The other important advantages of
both Table of Contents and the Back of the Book indexes would be using the
topic names and the index keywords for retrieving these books, which describe
the book exactly with the same descriptors used by the author. This would be
much better than using general subject headings assigned from thesauri
or from other standard Subject Headings Lists.
Arrangement of Books :
Future Prospects
The book collections in libraries
to this date have been arranged in the stacks according to their classification
numbers, and it is still possible in most libraries
to go to the open stacks and find the
specific book in its right place
according to its subject. Classification
helps library users to go to the their section of interest where they find related
books on the shelves; scanning
through their pages, going over table of contents and the book indexes, they can
decide if they want that specific book or not. The
practice of classification which has
been carried out in libraries for almost
150 years and has been taught as an
academic subject in LIS programs since Melvil Dewey (1851–1931) established the
first school of “library economy” in the
USA in 1876. But the outlook for the future is
now fundamentally challenged by digital
technologies at both the practical and at the theoretical levels. (Hjørland,
B.)
Besides, in recent years relating
to the world of libraries, one of
the most interesting notions that came up was that “books are to be stored by
size!” Later it
became apparent that in a few
special big libraries, books were
already stored by size – these were
libraries with collections of two
or three million books, known to be
using this type of storage in USA,
Canada and Europe. It
might be a strong prospect for the near
future, since it is a real situation
created by fast growing knowledge
production as versus more expensive land and property prices to invest for new library buildings or extensions to keep their growing knowledge
materials. As educational standards go higher
and education gets more diverse and prevalent, knowledge resources become more
and manifold.
Arrangement by size means library materials wouldn’t be directly
available to researchers, because they
would not be allowed to go to the stacks for book selection in their field of
interest. No way to search a million or
more unclassified books on shelves! It looks like in the near future – for researchers or
academicians, teachers or students, and
also general readers – hunting for books
will not be as exciting as it used to be, since it will not be possible to go
around moving from section to section - to (100s) for Philosophy
and Psychology; to (300s) for Social
Sciences; or to (800s) for Literature or
Rhetoric ; or stroll on even further searching books classified under LC
letters, e.g.
(M) for Music, (N)
for Fine Arts, or (P) for
Language and Literature, etc. And
what would be the use of classifying and assigning classification numbers for
these books?
This will probably
bring forth a serious problem for both the readers and librarians to face, in
many similar cases in the near future: how will the readers decide which book
to request from the librarian to bring from the stacks? and will that book be a
good choice? and how many books a
librarian will have to bring from the stacks, until finally it is the right
book for the reader or researcher?
Technology as a
Solution? (Pt. 1)
Natural language search engines are providing some
great results, and some very mixed results, and these results improve for
people who are willing to learn the tricks for getting the best out of each
engine. However natural language engines only solve one aspect of searching,
and there are vast holes that are not picked up by an engine, due to metaphor,
or the way a document is titled or structured, or how the search is
phrased. Relying on automation to
retrieve information, some will be lost. "Important information will no
longer be made retrievable. Instead, information will become important simply
because it is retrievable." (Evans,
R, 2002). Missing a small piece of
information for research might sometimes cost much more than the cost of
human contribution for indexing the subject; it is also important that indexing
should be done by subject specialists in their own fields, specially in an age
when information is growing and branching out so fast. Technology is a great help in various
ways for fully analyzed knowlege content, but it is also very important to
exert consistency and compatibility in content analysis when relying on
technology.
New methods and systems coming up for knowledge
searching and retrieving books, as well as
advances in technology, will help making these traditional tools work
better and in more versatile and useful ways. Already, a new project ongoing in the area of indexing aims
to create semantic tags in large sets of
digital scholarly books, however a similar system can also be easily applied to books. This project intends to use
topics that are derived from back of the book index entries, where the page
numbers are also given next to them to enable the researcher to find further
discussions on the topic. That might help users discover further content that they wouldn’t be able to
find via traditional metadata. For
example, a library cataloger usually
describes a book with 3 to 5
subject headings taken from Standard Subject Headings lists, however this
way the catalogers will have the opportunity of adding more keywords for a more detailed content analysis
and search. (Provo, A.)
The response (small at first) to the early studies gained momentum with the
widespread implementation of OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog). As more OPACs were implemented in libraries,
interest in finding ways to enhance OPAC records increased. In the early 1980s,
Mandel and Herschman described the increase in searching power due to online
catalogs and suggested ways of enhancing online catalog records: adding more
subject headings, providing special thesaurus terms, updating and distributing
online versions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), browsing by
classification, exploring better user interfaces, and undertaking further study
of the relation between the bibliographic record and actual subject searches.
Several years later, (Van Orden, R) raised similar issues as program director for
research and academic libraries at OCLC, emphasizing the need for including
content-enriched access to electronic information: “With the continuing increases in computer
processing and storage capabilities, the barriers to and benefits of electronic
access to more information content are becoming serious issues in information
science research… Well-selected content components and full-text materials in
electronic systems must be linked with improved search methodologies, better
computer interfaces, and greater understanding of the structure and use of
knowledge.” (Van
Orden, R). These studies also show that content management relies
on words and ideas, rather than in depth classification of subjects for
arrangement of materials on shelves.
Technology as a Solution: Pt. 2 here.
Another way
automation will be helpful is in physically approaching the printed books and
materials in special boxes or bins where they are kept in big libraries. This
is when users cannot go to the stacks to review the material for themselves.
Then it is time to use technology again to
solve the problem with the system
called ASRS – Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems – in all large libraries
possibly with 2 million or more books. This is also the time when
librarians will have to be more careful and meticulous about various subject indexing formats and decide how well these can be applied for knowledge retrieval;
e.g. for online materials as well for print books stored in bins arranged by
size.
Thus, with the help of technology how these upheavals
will be overcome and as in fully
automated libraries using “Automated Storage and Retrieval System – ASRS”,
it is possible to bring books from the shelves and give
them to the patrons; for obvious safety reasons, no human being can
browse the shelves of an ASRS storage area. That is because there are no
shelves, only gigantic racks containing huge bins full of books. Cranes and
robots do all the heavy lifting. (Humphreys,
2013)
The question
is: Will Indexing Take Over?
In recent times, librarians rather
depend on technology as a
solution to information management and retrieval problems; however
we must accept the fact that
human intellect is the major contributer to knowledge management. It is rightly claimed by the British Council
Information Department that “for the organization of information and of
documents, the contribution of technology in comparison to human intellect, is 85% to 15% in favor of intellect”. It
certainly seems that indexing will never disappear as long as knowledge
in all formats grows and expands;
in application, it might require different ways to approach the full
content with the help of technology.
Therefore, indexers must first do
the analytical thinking, e.g. ‘content
management’, by creating catagories,
headings and subheadings, and keywords to define the topic in
search. Then comes the type of
technology and the creation of software to record and disseminate the
information to the users as easily and as fast as possible.
“Just imagine – what if libraries of the
future didn’t have any shelves to browse, and library books didn’t have any
call numbers? How would you find a book you wanted at the library?” is rightly
asked by Nancy Humphrey. The fact is
that, since more and more online knowledge and information is taking place in
the recent year; and since the younger generation tend reading their materials
on the screen of their computers, or as a matter of fact on their tablets or even cell phones; since
even the daily papers are being available online, and since it is more
convenient to download and save articles
into the computers, and it is just as easy to highlight your articles on your computers as it is to
underline them on printed journals for selection; and finally if libraries are searching ways of gaining more
free space in their buildings, what do we need classification for?
Contents Analysis and Indexing: the oldest indispensible professions.
According to the Chinese legend, around 1150 B.C., a wise and
beloved ruler named King Wen
created a ‘book of wisdom’. He had his interesting way of putting three line
geometric symbols called “trigrams” in an order so he created his table of
contents to his book, which consisted of 64 “main headings and which could have been an index for his book if
those 64 headings could be put into an
alphabetical order. However, Chinese language, not having an alphabet, it was
not possible to put into alphabetical order.
Just
as content tables and indexing stand out
as being the oldest professions in the world, looking into the future and to many years to come, it is easy see that these will be two most demanding
and imperative professions to design
progress and mastery in life through
defining science and human studies by words. If we
check headings on the internet, such as Database administrator; Content
analysis; Content menagers; Web design administrator; Data storage and data
access; Data management systems and Archival management; it will be easy to see
that these are important areas in all scientific and scholarly studies.
Words are important and
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