EXPERTISE AND STRATEGIES FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE MAIN IDEAS IN DOCUMENT INDEXING

This research project examined strategies used by indexers in identify ing important concepts in scientific books. Indexing consists of emplo ying a controlled terminology to express the important ideas contained in a given document. Twenty indexers of varying types and degrees of expertise indexed four books, noting, first, terms representing the ma in ideas, and then the indexing terms taken from a documentary languag e. The indexers not familiar with the content domain of the books iden tified fewer concepts than the indexers familiar with the domain, and based their judgements on surface-level features of the information. P rior knowledge of the experiment's documentary language guided the cho ice of some concepts, which could be translated into controlled terms, resulting in more rapid identification. These results showed that ide ntifying important concepts could be due to perceptual processing base d on specific cues, as well as conceptual processing based on prior kn owledge of the documentary language and the domain to be indexed.