We received 82 responses to the question asking whether descriptions are indexed by subject. Most (42) do so, and follow recognised rules (UKAT, Unesco, LCSH, etc.). A significant proportion (29) index using in-house rules and some do not index by subject (18). Comments on this question indicated that in-house rules often supplement recognised standards, sometimes providing specialised terms where standards are too general (although I wonder whether these respondents have looked at Library of Congress headings, which are sometimes really quite satisfyingly specific, from the behaviour of the great blue heron to the history of music criticism in 20th century Bavaria).
- it is good practice
- it is essential for resource discovery
- users find it easier than full-text searching
- it gives people an indication of the subject strengths of collections
- it imposes consistency
- it is essential for browsing (for users who prefer to navigate in this way)
- it brings together references to specific events
- it brings out subjects not made explicit in keyword searching
- it enables people to find out about things and about concepts
- it may provide a means to find out about a collection where it is not yet fully described
- it maximises the utility of the catalogues
- it helps users identify the most relevant sources
- it can indicate useful material that may not otherwise be found
- it enables themes to be drawn out that may be missed by free-text searching
- it can aid teachers
- it helps with answering enquiries
- it facilitate access across the library and archive
- it meets the needs of academic researchers
- the scope of the archive is tightly defined so subject indexing is less important
- the benefits are not clear
- the lack of a thesaurus that is specific enough to meet needs
- a management decision that it is ‘faddy’
- the collections are too extensive
- the cataloguing backlog is the priority
- being led by what is within the software used for cataloguing
- the need to work cross-domain
- the need to be interoperable
- the need to apply very specific subject terms
- the need to follow what the library does
- the importance of an international perspective
- the lack of forethought on how users might use indexes
- the lack of a specialist thesaurus in the subject area the repository represents (e.g. religious orders)
- following the recommendations of the Archives Hub and A2A