Re: subject access

["George Brock-Nannestad" <gbn.av@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear William Meredith,

I am one of those who responded to your original query with some 
viewpoints on how to deal with a treasure-trove of unknown 
material. You did at the time mention that you had an upcoming 
paper task. At the risk that what I am about to write will come 
across far harsher than it is intended, I am still going to write a 
comment on your most recent wish.

I am not convinced that doing a survey of archives during the last 
days of your preparation time is really a good idea. It will not even 
be random, because your result will be entirely dependent on how 
sympathetic the ARSCLIST subscribers will be towards your 
situation. And frankly, the audio archiving community deserves 
better, and so do you! 

You would probably do much better and actually improve your own 
skills much more if you went into the fundamentals of thesaurii and 
tried to apply their fundamental philosophies to the idea that there 
is also structure to spoken word. Proper thesaurii are not just lists 
of standard keywords to be used for a given body of knowledge but 
they also deal with the hierarchical relationships between the 
terms. The idea is that the indexing of the item of interest must be 
to such a depth that a search by means of a Related Term or a 
Broader Term (in particular the latter) will also provide a hit, 
although the original indexing may be only on the Narrower Term 
level. And there is usually no relationship between abstracting and 
the assignment of Indexing Terms, because then you could just do 
a free-text search and not restrict the search to the Index Terms 
field. But then the supplementary advantage of being able to use 
free text for refinement goes.

I do not believe that general books and articles are bad for you - 
you should perhaps try to take their examples and imagine that 
you are not dealing with a scientific article but with various types of 
content of a show or programme on the radio. Then you will have 
applied the general knowledge to your specific task, and this must 
come over as interesting. Merely quoting that this archive does 
this, and the other archive does that, will bring you nowhere, and a 
library science audience would probably be bored.

So, I am turning down your request for specific information because 
I think that it is an advantage to all parties at all involved that you 
do your homework first.

Get going, and good luck,


George Brock-Nannestad
Preservation Tactics