A Case Study in Indexing and Classification in the Sociology of Education. Development of Ideas Concerning the Organisation of Material for Literature Searching. Report for the Period September 1970-June 1973. Volume One.

N

463

Abstracting; Case Studies; Classification; Conceptual Schemes; Educational Sociology; Indexes; Indexing; Information Processing; Information Science; Information Services; Research Reports; Social Sciences; Subject Index Terms

The objective of this project was to build a non-interfering indexing system, in which the social scientist users, who have varying conceptual orientations toward their field, would not be restricted in their literature searching by a single conceptual orientation imposed on the system by information scientists. With the cooperation of subject experts, a bibliography and index of a sample of material was compiled and is presented in Volume II of this report. The present volume begins with an introduction and overview which form a preface to a thematically grouped selection of papers. These papers were prepared at different periods in the project, and illustrate the various stages in the thinking and experimentation carried out by the research team. Topics include: 1) early organization of the project, 2) experiments in the appropriateness of the PRECIS indexing system, 3) development of an alternative rationale for indexing, 4) procedures for the selection, processing and description of documents, 5) overall intellectual organization of the index, principles of indexing and the establishment of subject headings. (SL)

1974

ED086258