User-responsive subject control in bibliographic retrieval systems

摘要

A study was carried out of [1] the relationship between the vocabulary of user queries and the vocabulary of documents relevant to the queries, and [2] the value of adding to the document description record in a retrieval system keywords from previous queries for which the document had proven useful. Two test databases incorporating user query keywords were implemented at the School of Library and Information Science, University of Western Ontario. Clustering of the documents via little and user keywords, a statistical analysis of title-user keyword co-occurrences, and retrieval tests were used to examine the effect of the added keywords. Results showed the impracticality of the procedure in an operational setting, but indicated the value of the analyses with sample data in the development and maintenance of keyword dictionaries and thesauri.