Practicality of Coordinate Indexing
G. E. Randall · College & Research Libraries · 1954
OORDINATE INDEXING obtained its first large scale audience in February 1953 when the ASTIA report catalog cards listing the Uniterms on the back were distributed.The basic principles of coordinate indexing are relatively simple.The system of using subject headings, as practiced by librarians and commercial indexers, is discarded.Instead, the subject content of the item to be indexed is broken down into its major concepts, and single words, called Uniterms, are selected by the indexer to denote the concepts.As many Uniterms are used as are necessary to index any single item.In the first 45 ASTIA cards reviewed, the number of Uniterms used ranged from four to twelve and averaged eight per report.Each item to be indexed by the system is assigned an accession number and each Uniterm used is recorded on a card.As a report is indexed, its accession number is recorded on the appropriate Uniterm cards.The searcher selects the Uniterms which describe the information for which he is looking and compares the Uniterm cards for common accession numbers.The reports having the common accession numbers contain, according to the proponents of the system, the information desired.The advocates of coordinate indexing claim many advantages for the system including a reduction in the elephantine size of the card catalog, a technique which permits the user to locate easily the specific information desired, and a decrease in the librarian's work load.A small report collection of 20,000 reports may be indexed conventionally by approximately 110,000 cards as follows: 20,000 report number cards, 50,000 personal and corporate author cards, and 40,000 subject cards.It is conceivable that coordinate indexing techniques might be applied to the author file but to do so would provoke as many problems as it would solve.The card catalog utilizing the coordinate indexing system would probably include the following: 20,000 accession cards, 20,000 report number cards, 50,000 personal and corporate author cards and 8,000 or more Uniterm cards, a total of 98,000 cards which represents a reduction of slightly over 10%.