25 Mart 2021 Perşembe

Tables of Contents and Indexes

 Search of Knowledge (Tables of Contents and Indexes)

Meral Alakuş (Dahousie University)

 Abstract

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.

https://op.europa.eu/en/web/endorse/programme




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IN SEARCH OF KNOWLEDGE

(Tables of Contents and Indexes)


Meral Alakuş


March 2021, Turkey 

 

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

Words are powerful. Choose them well. - YouTube

 

References: 

Belkin NJ, Chang SJ, Downs T, Saracevic T, Zhao S.. Taking account of user tasks, goals and behavior for the design of online public access catalogs. ASIS Proc. 1990;27:69–73. [Google Scholar]

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Hedden, Heather. The Accidental Taxonomist. New Jersey, Information Today. 2010,  p.6.

Hedden, Heather. Key words.  vol. 20, No. 2,  p. 49.

Hjørland, Birger.  Journal of Documentation. April, 2012. Vol. 68, No. 3, p. 299-317.

Humphreys, Nancy K. (http://wordmapsindexing.com/table-of-contents-and-index/)

Humphreys, Nancy. (Sept. 19, 2013)  Will Indexing Disappear If Library Books Lack Discoverability?  http://wordmapsindexing.com/library-book-discoverability (google)

King, Brett.  (2010) Too much content: a world of exponential information growth.  (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-much-content-a-world_b_809677)

Leise, Fred, et al. (2008).  Indexing for Editors and Authors. American Society of Indexers.  N.J., Information Today. 

Mandel, Carol A. and Judith Herschman, 1983. "Online Subject Access-Enhancing the Library Catalog,” Journal of Academic Librarianship, 9 (3) : 148-155.

Provo, Alexandra.Transcribed-Interview-with-Alex-Provo. Pdf.” (https://www.humanitiesebook.org /wp-content/uploads/ 2017/11/Transcribed-Interview-with-Alex-Provo.pdf)

Schilling, David R.  (2013)  http://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-months-soon-to-be-every-12-hours/3950)

Van Orden, Richard. Content-enriched access to electronic information: summaries of selected  research.   Libr. Hi Tech. 1990;8(0):27. [Google Scholar)

Vickery, Brian. (2008)  On knowledge organisation.”  published on lucis. me.uk.  https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ Brian_Campbell_Vickery 

Wellisch, H. H. (1991) Indexing from A to Z.  New York,  H. W.  Wilson, p. xxiii)

 

 

 


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