Kaiser, J.O.: Systematic indexing (1985)
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- Abstract
- A native of Germany and a former teacher of languages and music, Julius Otto Kaiser (1868-1927) came to the Philadelphia Commercial Museum to be its librarian in 1896. Faced with the problem of making "information" accessible, he developed a method of indexing he called systematic indexing. The first draft of his scheme, published in 1896-97, was an important landmark in the history of subject analysis. R. K. Olding credits Kaiser with making the greatest single advance in indexing theory since Charles A. Cutter and John Metcalfe eulogizes him by observing that "in sheer capacity for really scientific and logical thinking, Kaiser's was probably the best mind that has ever applied itself to subject indexing." Kaiser was an admirer of "system." By systematic indexing he meant indicating information not with natural language expressions as, for instance, Cutter had advocated, but with artificial expressions constructed according to formulas. Kaiser grudged natural language its approximateness, its vagaries, and its ambiguities. The formulas he introduced were to provide a "machinery for regularising or standardising language" (paragraph 67). Kaiser recognized three categories or "facets" of index terms: (1) terms of concretes, representing things, real or imaginary (e.g., money, machines); (2) terms of processes, representing either conditions attaching to things or their actions (e.g., trade, manufacture); and (3) terms of localities, representing, for the most part, countries (e.g., France, South Africa). Expressions in Kaiser's index language were called statements. Statements consisted of sequences of terms, the syntax of which was prescribed by formula. These formulas specified sequences of terms by reference to category types. Only three citation orders were permitted: a term in the concrete category followed by one in the process category (e.g., Wool-Scouring); (2) a country term followed by a process term (e.g., Brazil - Education); and (3) a concrete term followed by a country term, followed by a process term (e.g., Nitrate-Chile-Trade). Kaiser's system was a precursor of two of the most significant developments in twentieth-century approaches to subject access-the special purpose use of language for indexing, thus the concept of index language, which was to emerge as a generative idea at the time of the second Cranfield experiment (1966) and the use of facets to categorize subject indicators, which was to become the characterizing feature of analytico-synthetic indexing methods such as the Colon classification. In addition to its visionary quality, Kaiser's work is notable for its meticulousness and honesty, as can be seen, for instance, in his observations about the difficulties in facet definition.
