Digital Information Literacy

Introduction:

Society has been transformed by the rapid development by the diffusion of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the fields such as Education, Business, Health, Agriculture, and so on. Information users may be bewildered by a variety of digitalized information. The process of identifying and selecting information has become complex. It is critical to promote Information Literacy (IL) in the digital age. Now computers have become a necessary part of the digital society and skills for computer use are a common prerequisite on many job applications. The Department of Education, Training, and Employment (2001) Information literacy has become a global issue and many Information Literacy initiatives are being documented throughout the world. Information Literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning and self-learning. It is common to all disciplines to all learning environments and to all level of education.

Information Literacy is a term used to describe a set of skills that enable individuals to seek, find, utilize and cite high-quality information quickly and efficiently. Information seeking is a process in which humans engage in order to advance and potentially alter their state of knowledge. It is also an important cognitive function related to learning and problem solving, technique.

Definitions:

Association of College and Research Libraries (2000), define Information Literacy as “a set of abilities requiring individuals to determine the extent of information needed, access the needed information effectively and efficiently; evaluate information and its sources critically, incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base; use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose; understand economic, legal and social issues, surrounding the use of information ethically and legally”. Further, it also helps to manage and maintain the information, provides means of access to the information search for information and gather, evaluate and use information.

Digital Information Literacy:

Digital Information Literacy is a relatively new concept, it is one of the major components in Information Literacy. The digitally literate can confidently use, manage, create, quote and share sources of digital information in an effective way. The way in which information is used, created and distributed demonstrates an understanding and acknowledgment of the cultural, ethical, economic, legal and social aspects of information. The digitally literate demonstrate openness, ability to solve the problem, critically reflect, technical capability and willingness to collaborate and keep up-to-date prompted by the changing contexts in which they use information.

Glister (1997, p.290) define Digital Literacy as, “a set of skills to access the Internet; find, manage and edit digital information; join communications; and otherwise engage with an online information and communication network. In general terms, digital information literacy is an ability to use properly and evaluate digital resources, tools, and services and apply it to their lifelong process.” The New Media Consortium (2005, p.2) states that Digital Literacy, “includes the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively and easily adapt them to new forms.” The most essential aspect of digital literacy is the ability to make informed judgments about what is found online, for unlike conventional media, much digital information is unfiltered by editors and open to the contribution of all. There is no mechanism to control over the digital resources. Hence to get quality of the information in the online environment the digital literacy is very much essential for everyone.

Digital literate people are able to:

• Determine the extent of digital information needed,
• Access the needed digital information effectively and efficiently,
• Evaluate digital information sources and services critically,
• Incorporate selected digital Information in one’s knowledge base,
• Use of digital information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose; and
• Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of digital.
• Information access and use of information ethically and legally and respectfully.

It helps users cope with information from a variety of electronic formats and provides techniques and methods of collecting digital resources. It creates awareness of issues like copyright, and intellectual property rights in an electronic environment.

Digital Literacy Competencies:

Computers and productivity tools help library patrons to access information, generate insights, structure results into useful, formal, and product knowledge. The use of these productivity tools by patrons requires librarians to alter their traditional professional role, which was primarily to provide information access for patrons so that they can also provide expanded services and support to these patrons.

The traditional role of librarians was viewed as one of the making information accessible to patrons using various tools and process in the library. Yet the emergence of technology has significantly changed the role of librarians (Gottesman, 2001). There is a paradigm shift; librarians now are expected to assist patrons in integrating materials into their research processes at the time of information access. In discussing the current state of affairs in libraries, Mc. Fadden (2001) argues that there is a critical distinction to be made between librarians’ competencies with productivity tools and their level of information retrieval skills. The American Library Association (ALA 2001) stated that it is becoming an essential part of library services to help patrons to develop the competencies that they need to function effectively and efficiently in the emerging digital culture of the 21st century (ALA,2001).

Digital Literacy Competencies and Librarians:

The global society does not recognize nor respect boundaries. Areas that were once the domain of the librarian have been encroached upon by other sectors, groups, and professions. Library and information staff will need to have experience expertise and proficiency in traditional, electronic and transferable skills. The skills required in the twenty-first century include strategic thinking, managing change, financial management customer satisfaction, communications, decision-making, as well as understanding the role of ICT and digital literacy competencies.

Changing Characteristics of Digital Information Literacy:

1) To select, acquire, preserve, organize and manage digital collections.

2) To Design the technical architecture of Digital Literacy.

3) To describe the content and attributes of items.

4) To plan, implement, and support digital services such as information navigation, consultation and transmits services.

Digital Literacy in Changing Environment:

The digital Librarians should acquire the latest techniques to meet the needs of the users. He should have the qualities and capabilities. The knowledge of the digital librarians should not confine to a single field. He should cover varied subjects such as Library Science, Computer Science, and some specific technologies, communication science, etc. The digital librarians should have the information literacy qualities to disseminate the right information at the right time.

Digital Information Literacy for Lifelong Learning:

When investigating research question the answers about the importance of Digital Information Literacy for the lifelong learning of staff and students (including Maori and Pasifika), productivity and innovation were sought. The participants definitely left the project better equipped to deal with the technological challenges, and more motivated to utilize a wider and more diverse range of tools and strategies for lifelong learning.

Collected From:

• Pujari, R. L. (2018). Digital Information Literacy A Study of North Karnataka Degree College Faculty Members.

The post Digital Information Literacy appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1.1 Introduction:

The present world is fast changing from the industrial world to the information world. It requires speedy, accurate, ready and reliable information. A large amount of information is being generated every moment. The information has become a strategic raw material and a dominating factor in decision making and execution. Information is and will be a primordial need for each individual in this world. Information is regarded as “Lifeblood of society” and a vital resource for national development.

Knowledge is becoming multi-dimensional, multidisciplinary and it is growing fast because of the information revolution. This revolution is spinning around the computing and communication tools which forms the backbone of information technology (IT). Knowledge and information coexist to complement and supplement each other with the support of I.T. This scenario has given rise to the new dimensions of knowledge that not only accelerates its growth but has also transformed the nature of its resources from the printed form to the electronic/digital form such as magnetic tapes, floppy disks, CD-ROM, etc. With the emergence of INTERNET era a rapid phase of growth such as online databases, List Serves, discussion groups, electronic journals, etc has enriched the accessibility of information. The development of digital libraries, virtual libraries have further promoted library activities and have taken them beyond four walls.

However, there are libraries with rare collections which are the treasures of local heritage. They reflect the heritage and culture of the society. The information in these libraries is in a variety of forms such as palm leaves, manuscripts, printed books, etc. Preservation requirements of these library holdings are obviously different from those of libraries established during the recent past. These libraries have the special responsibility of preserving heritage and culture as it is the duty of all library staff, from the head of the library down to the last worker at the bottom to safeguard, protect and preserve the holdings in their libraries. Preservation measures have to be endorsed supported and encouraged from the most senior level to the most junior in the library. Those who are responsible for managing the library and maintaining the external and internal fabric of the building need to work closely with those who are responsible for the preservation of the collections. Preservation needs of a library have to be considered in line with the social and political climate in which the organization operates. The organization’s purpose, collecting policies, and available resources also matter in preserving this wealth of resources.

Efforts have been made by some of these libraries to convert few rare materials in microforms and in digital form. This kind of enormous shift in information storage and dissemination technology has called for dual responsibilities on the part of librarians. Firstly, to accept the change and adapt the concept of access to information rather than owning such information. This calls for developing a technology base and digital library resources and facilitate users with access to information electronically. Secondly, take necessary steps not only to preserve existing print and non-print materials for future use but also promote easy access to such information.

1.2. Need for Preservation & Conservation Library Collection:

Need for Preservation & Conservation Library collection generally contains a wide range of organic materials, including paper, cloth, animal skin, and adhesives, and modern media such as microforms, optical and magnetic discs, digital formats, photographs, and audio and visual media. The organic substances undergo a continual and inevitable natural aging process. While measures can be taken to slow this deterioration by careful handling and providing a sympathetic environment, it is impossible to halt it altogether. The chemical and physical stability of library material also depends on the quality and processing of the raw products used in their manufacture together with the design and construction of the final artifact. Over the centuries, the pressures of mass production have reduced the material quality of what is received in libraries. Much of the paper stock manufactured after 1850 is highly acidic, becomes brittle, and will self-destruct in time. Binding techniques have been abbreviated for the sake of automation and many text-blocks are now held together solely by adhesive. In fact, all books and, in particular, leather bindings, are far more susceptible to damage. Though these documents have inherent preservation problems they need to be stored and used carefully if they are not to perish prematurely. Thus two major problems confront a librarian seeking a pre-1900 book are durability and scarcity. A book printed from the mid-1800s on is probably made of acid paper, bound in a machine-made case and very fragile.

Preservation of information is an idea whose time has come. Preservation and conservation (PAC) are related activities, relevant in library and information centers (LICs). If considered at all, they were deemed to be the province of those who had the care of rare books and manuscripts. But during recent past, the view of PAC has expanded to become an integral part of the much wider area of collection management and a vital element in the provision of access to information. If the particular medium, which records the information, has been allowed to decay and disappear, then access to it is impossible. This increased perception of the essential requirement of preservation is perhaps related to the ‘green revolution’ generally, global warming, pollution and the burning of fossil fuels. The World Environment Summits at Rio in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 and numerous other events have all contributed to the growing awareness of the importance of preserving and conserving the physical environment; some of this concern has percolated into the thinking of library and information managers (LIMs) who are concerned with access to information and its provision to their users.

There are, of course, more specific reasons than the general ‘greening’ of society for the heightened awareness of the need to preserve collections of information. An early one was the discovery of the ‘brittle books syndrome’. Most books printed after about 1850 and some even before that date were produced on paper which was chemically unstable and these books were literally crumbling into dust on the shelves of hundreds of libraries around the world. John Murray wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1823: “Allow me to call the attention of your readers to the present state of what wretched compound called paper. Every printer will corroborate my testimony; and I am only neglected and forgotten. It is a duty, however, of the most imperative description; – our beautiful Religion, our Literature, our Science, all are threatened., (84) A good study was undertaken by the Harvard University Library Task Group on Collection Preservation Priorities (1991). The flood which devastated the city of Florence in 1966 caused enormous damage to the priceless documents in the Italian State Archives. Substantial donations of money poured in, but it quickly became apparent that there were not sufficient numbers of trained conservators to undertake the highly skilled workers required for restoration. Most of the damage was repaired eventually, but the disaster revealed a serious gap in the knowledge of preservation management and technique worldwide.

International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) (84) set up its core Preservation and Conservation Programme in 1984 as a logical continuation of the earlier programs of Universal Bibliographic Control and Universal Availability of Publications. The progrmme is based at the Library of Congress (LC) and encourages research into different methods of preservation and the formulation of policy and strategy at national and international levels. The LC has published several comprehensive handbooks on practical preservation techniques and funded extensive research into the mass de-acidification of paper.

Ratclliffe Report (UK1984) (84) investigated preservation policies and conservation practices in British libraries. The British Library also set up the National Preservation Office (NPO) to provide a focus for preservation planning and co-operation. Ratcliffe was succeeded in widening the concern beyond the rarefied world of special collections and antiquarian materials by bringing awareness among those concerned and the public. It has lead to a number of subsequent studies.

France, Germany, and Spain, have begun to put considerable emphasis on preservation and conservation in recent years. UNESCO has also turned its attention to these issues with the publication of two key documents, Guidelines on preservation and conservation policies in libraries and archives (Chapman, 1990 ) and Preservation and conservation of library documents: A UNESCO/IFLA/ICA inquiry into the current state of the World “s patrimony (Clements, 1987). The UN ESCO’s `Memory of the World programme’ is yet another noteworthy effort concerning to preservation and conservation of heritage materials.

All these activities provide evidence of the serious problem of decaying and disappearing materials on a global scale. Hence, it is the challenge for library and information managers to translate this concern using the knowledge and techniques available into a programme appropriate for the particular task and the information and materials which it wants and needs to preserve.

Preservation can only be successfully managed if it is perceived as a core task throughout the institution and if preservation experts are committed in all activities, including digitization initiatives undertaken in the name of access. It is of paramount importance that the preservation field keeps up the dialogue about the preservation of every initiative. They can bring a perspective of continuity to the discussion and make it clear that there is more to access than documents and images into tiffs and terabytes (LUSEN ET, 1999). (48)

1.3. Techniques Used for Preservation of Library Materials:

Some of the techniques used to preserve rare materials are:

A. Chemical De-acidification:

De-acidification merely arrests deterioration for a while, but if the book is already fragile, it remains so. From a collaborative perspective, if there are multiple copies of an old book scattered around the library, it is likely to be cheaper to film or scan the best available copy once and then reproduce it, than to de-acidify all the copies. In addition microfilming creates a copying master and a bibliographic entry that provide broad access to the information. De-acidification can be done on an item-by-item basis at individual libraries. The cost of page-by-page paper treatment, by spraying a chemical fog on the page, is more than the cost of copying, even for one copy. The costs of this more elaborate preservation technique which require disassembly and rebinding of each item, are basically prohibitive for books that do not have high value as artifacts. Paper preservation and individual book conservation, however, are the only technologies that preserve the original book itself.

B. Microfilming:

Microfilming normally involves producing a roll film master, even if the final version of the book will be on fiche. Microfiche is not considered a preservation format but can be produced from preservation roll film as an access medium. Microfiche can provide random access to a particular frame faster than roll film, and microfiche reading machines are cheaper than microfilm reading machines.

Microfiche has accepted a medium of choice for a microform book catalogue. However, many readers dislike both microfilm and microfiche.

C. Digital imagery:

In digital imagery books is scanned into computer storage, which is a promising alternative process. Storing page images of books permits the rapid transfer of books from library to library. The images can be displayed or printed, much as film images, although with greater cost today. Additionally, digital imagery permits considerable reprocessing: adjustment of contrast, adjustment of image size, and so on. Handling of these images requires special skills and equipment few libraries possess, but there is rapid technological progress in the design of disk drives, displays, and printing devices.

D. ASCII (non-image):

ASCII storage is much more compact; a page of text that will use a few hundred Kbytes in image form will contain only one to two thousand bytes of ASCII, or 11100th of the space. Other advantages of ASCII storage include the ability to reformat and reprint whole or partial documents easily; the ability to extract quotations or other subsections of the documents and include them in newer papers; and the ability to mechanically compare texts. Editing texts for later publication also needs ASCII rather than image storage. More applications such as feeding the texts to speech synthesizers to be read aloud are also possible; ASCII text can also be displayed on a wider variety of equipment and on cheaper equipment. ASCII displays can be formatted for the particular screen size or program environment preferred by the user. The image quality shown does not reflect any fading or discoloration of the original

This Article Collected from:

• Sarasvathy, P. (2007). Preservation and conservation of rare materials in select libraries in Karnataka a study.

The post Preservation and Conservation of Library Materials appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

What is Digitization?

Witten and David (2003) defined digitization as the process of taking traditional library materials, that are in the form of books and papers and converting them to the electronic form, where they can be stored and manipulated by a computer. This basically involves changing analog data into a digital form, so that it is easier to access and also has a long study life. This process is not a separate activity to be viewed in isolation, but an active part of a library’s functioning.

As the main purposes of libraries are to acquire and preserve material, for the perusal of those who seek information, the benefit of having this material in digital form is quite obvious. The bulk of such information from varied sources can be stored in digital form using technology and can be kept for a long period of time in a better condition, while at the same time can be easily studied by greater numbers of scholars, in a present time period.

The major concern of today’s libraries is in the preservation of precious literary works, those are or have deteriorated alarmingly, and whose preservation is a costly and time-consuming process. While getting all these works, from various libraries, into a digitized form, the libraries save in time and effort on the conservation of these works; preserve them more effectively, while ensuring that all this material is still available at any time for perusal.

Finally, it can be stated that digitization is mainly the process of conversion of written or printed records into electronic form. This can also be in audio imagery are a combination of above-mentioned forms. The electronic output so created can then be placed on modern information providing systems like the internet or intranet. This electronic output can also be in a Portable Document Format (PDF) on a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF).

It therefore now common, to find more and more information being digitized, and uploaded into the internet or on compact discs so that it is globally accessible, easily and quickly.

Digital Preservation:

With rapid developments in information technology and communication systems, the organization and management of such information has also undergone major transformation (Mazumdar, 2009)

This has had a profound effect on library and information centers, mainly in the field of preservation, using digital methods on non-digital documents. Conservation of digital resources to preserve our heritage can occur in many forms, be it in digital images, e-journals, database records, websites, audio-visual material or interactive programs.

Preservation can be defined as a set of activities to ensure maintenance for a long time of documents, and also making ready accessibility incorporating latest technological advantages.

The Encyclopedia of Information Technology (Amjad, 2005) defines the term digital preservation as “The process of maintaining, in a condition suitable for use, materials produced in digital formats. Problems of physical preservation are compounded by the obsolescence of computer equipment, software, and storage media. It also refers to the practice of digitizing materials, originally produced in non-digital formats (print, film, etc.), to prevent permanent loss due to deterioration of the physical medium.”

Hence digital preservation has two dimensions, firstly to preserve the material already in digital form and secondly to digitize and preserve material that is likely to get spoilt with time. Once this is done, then accessibility on a global scale of any material can be achieved. For such preservation, two processes are followed,

a. To create an image file of the material.

b. To scan and use processes to make the text file error free.

Once done these files can be stored in secondary devices and placed in appropriate storage areas.

This article collected from:

• Seifi, L. (2011). Digitization and digital preservation of the heritage collection in select libraries in India and Iran: a comparative study.

The post Digitization and digital preservation appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1.1 Introduction:

An ontology is a conceptual representation of a worldview and this world view is highly contextual. The scope of the world could be limited or expansive. Also, it could be a real world or an imaginary world (LIU & OZSU, 2009). Ontologies represent the world view with a graphical structure (“Intro to Ontologies – OSF Wiki,” n.d.). From a philosophical point of view, ontology is “the study of the nature of the being, becoming, existence or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations” (“Ontology”, 2017, para. 1). On a close look, we find that there is a high resemblance with taxonomies and relational database schema with ontologies. All of them organize and represent domain knowledge in a hierarchical structure but ontologies can define concepts and build relations between them. The advantage of ontologies over taxonomies and relational databases is that it can define different kinds of relations in knowledge representational structure (Gasevic, Djuric, & Devedzic, 2009).

Gruber (1995) defines ontology as “an explicit specification of a conceptualization” (p. 2). It means that to represent a concept of the world some conceptualization is needed. Here “conceptualization” refers to an abstract or a simplified view of an idea. Such conceptualization could be explicit or implicit knowledge of that world or it could be any phenomenon or any topic (or topics), or any subject area of the world. The conceptualization process of a given domain (area of interest) is built upon the key elements of that domain. These key elements are; all the concepts, objects or entities belonging to that domain, and also the relationships among those concepts. “Specification” means “a formal and declarative representation”, which leads to the aspect of machine-readability of an ontology (Gasevic, Djuric, & Devedzic, 2009). To achieve this goal ontologies always use computer-usable definitions to represent the concepts. The goal of an ontology is not only to represent domain knowledge, but also to represent the knowledge in a way that it could be reusable also (if needed) (Innab, Yousef, & AI-Fayoumi, 2010). Ontologies could be described as a set of representational techniques in the field of computer and information sciences. According to Gruber (2008), ontologies use three major components to represent domain knowledge which is, “classes (or sets), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members)” (para. 2).

The standard practice of representing domain knowledge through ontologies is to deal with the terminologies or “domain vocabularies” of that domain. An ontology uses all essential concepts and classifies them according to the need. It represents those concepts and classification through a taxonomic structure with defining their relations and domain axioms. Gasevic, Djuric, and Devedzic (2009) describe a topic in a given domain D using language L. The ontology provides a platform to enlist type of things existing in D; the types include concepts, relations, and properties of D expressed using L.

1.2 Why Ontologies?

In the age of computer applications and semantic web technologies, ontology is an essential tool to build and use of various intelligent systems. It represents domain knowledge, which is easily understandable by both humans and machines. Ontologies play a crucial role to make interoperability efficient and smooth, among heterogeneous systems. Some of the major reasons for creating ontologies are explained by Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness (n.d.), which are:

• “To share a common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents.
• To enable reuse of domain knowledge.
• To make domain assumptions explicit.
• To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge.
• To analyze domain knowledge.” (para. 3)

There are few domains, like Natural-language Application, Database and Information Retrieval where ontologies play an important role. In the field of Natural-language Applications, ontologies are used to process natural-language and extract knowledge from scientific texts (e.g. Wordnet). Semantically rich information retrieval from a database could be done efficiently by using ontologies.

1.3 Historical Background of Ontology:

Ontology is one of the most powerful concepts in modern semantic technology, but the concept, as well as the term, is being used for several decades in different communities with widely diverse understanding. The origin of this term goes back to the Greek word “ontos”, and “logos”, which mean “being”, and “word” respectively. The term “Ontologia” was first used in the field of philosophy. Two philosophers Rudolf Goclenii in “Lexicon Philosophicum” (1613) and Jacob Lorhard in “Theatrum Philosophicum” (1613) coined the term “Ontologia” independently. The first appearance of the English term of ontology is been used in Bailey’s Dictionary in 1721, where it is defined as “an account of being in the abstract” (smith, 2015). It is often used as a synonym of “Metaphysics” by philosophers. The term “Metaphysics” isused by Aristotle’s student. Aristotle mentioned this idea (Metaphysics/Ontology) as the ‘first philosophy” (Pisanelli, De Lazzari, Innocenti, & Zanetti, 2009). So the concept of “Ontology” was there for a long time but only in recent years it gained popularity in the field of computers and became a machine-readable vocabulary. Ontology has been used to represent an area/or domain of knowledge in the field of computer and information science (Innab, Yousef, & Al-Fayoumi, 2010).

The concept of ontology came to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 1980’s. A group of researchers realized the power of ontologies from a different point of view, which is mathematical logic and they adopted the term “Ontology” (McCarthy, 1986). They argued that automated reasoning is possible through creating new ontologies as computational models (Hayes, 1985). According to them, the “computational ontology” is a kind of “applied philosophy”. For AI community ontology refers to two aspects, first one is “a theory of a modeled world” and the second one is “a component of knowledge systems” (Sowa, 1984).

In 1995, Guarino and Giariaretta have given a possible interpretation of the term “Ontology”. They have interpreted the term or concept of ontology with seven different points of views, which are:

i. “Ontology as a philosophical discipline

ii. Ontology as an informal conceptual system

iii. Ontology as a formal semantic account

iv. Ontology as a specification of a ‘Conceptualization’

v. Ontology as a representation of a conceptual system via a logical theory

a. characterized by specific formal properties

b. characterized only by its specific purposes

vi. Ontology as the vocabulary used by a logical theory vii. Ontology as a (meta-level) specification of a logical theory”

In the same year in another paper, Guarino explained “formal ontology”. He described ontology as the study and representation of our knowledge about “nature of world” or about any “organization” (Guarino, 1995). In 1998 Guarino describes “formal ontology” as a key player in the field of Information System and clearly explained how the concept of ontology is different in the philosophical sense and computer science domain. According to him in the philosophical sense, ontology is “a particular system of categories accounting for a certain vision of the world”. On the other hand in the domain of computer science, especially in AI, “an ontology refers to an engineering artifact, constituted by a specific vocabulary used to describe a certain reality” (Guarino, 1998, p. 4).

1.4 Definition of Ontology:

According to Tom Gruber (2009): “In the context of computer and information sciences, an ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse. The representational primitives are typically classes (or sets), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members)” (p. 1).

Open Semantic Framework defines ontologies as (“Intro to Ontologies”, 2014,), “Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information on the semantic Web and within semantic enterprises. They provide unique benefits in discovery, flexible access, and information integration due to their inherent connectedness; that is, their ability to represent conceptual relationships. Ontologies can be layered on top of existing information assets, which means they are an enhancement and not displacement for prior investments. And ontologies may be developed and matured incrementally, which means their adoption may be cost-effective as benefits become evident” (para. 1).

According to SemanticWeb.org (“Ontology.html”, 2012), “Ontologies are considered one of the pillars of the Semantic Web, although they do not have a universally accepted definition. A (Semantic Web) vocabulary can be considered as a special form of (usually light-weight) ontology, or sometimes also merely as a collection of URIs with an (usually informally) described meaning” (para. 1).

1.5 Components of Ontology:

Ontologies are made up of different components and it may vary from different perspectives and domains. The terminologies used to represent the components vary based on the philosophical point of view and the language used to build the ontology (Lord, 2010). Anyhow a common perception about the core components of an ontology is, there are four major components, which are; concepts, relations, instances and axioms (Stevens, 2001). Let us understand these one by one.

A. Concepts: Concepts are the set of classes with core entities in a domain. With the knowledge of these concepts, a domain could be explained or understood. According to Stevens (2001), concepts could be divided into two kinds. First one is “Primitive Concepts”, which refers to those concepts which are condition dependent. It means these concepts exist in a domain with some conditions. And the second concept is “Defined Concept”, which denotes those concepts which are absolutely necessary to explain a domain. If these concepts are missing from a particular domain, that domain knowledge cannot be explained efficiently.

B. Relations: Relations describes the “interaction between concepts or a concept’s property”. According to Steven, this component could fall into two major groups. The first group is “Taxonomical Relation”. With the help of taxonomical relation, one can arrange all concepts of a domain into sub-super-concept through tree structures. The second group is “Associative Relations”. This is the most unique component of an ontology, which helps to relate concepts across tree structures. This component gives ontology a better hand than taxonomies and relational databases in the context of defining the semantics.

C. Instances: Instances are the examples or the representations of a given concept. For example, if there is a concept called “flower” then “rose” or “lily” could be instances of that concept.

D. Axioms: In an ontology, there have to be some constraint values for either a given class or for a given instance. This constrain values are denoted by axioms.

1.6 Types of Ontologies:

There are different kinds of ontologies developed for various purposes. To categorize them, different classification approaches could be taken. Few well-known categorizations of ontologies have been given by Mizoguchi and colleagues (1995), van Heijst and colleagues (1997) Guarino (1998) and Lassila and McGuinness (2001).
According to Mizoguchi and colleagues (1995), there are four kinds of ontologies, as described below:

i. Content Ontologies: Content ontologies are the pioneers in the context of knowledge reusability. Its major goal is to facilitate reusability of knowledge across applications and across domains. This kind of ontology could be further subdivided into different categories like; “task ontologies”, “domain ontologies” and “general or common ontologies”.

ii. Communication Ontologies: This kind of ontologies are used heavily for knowledge sharing purposes. These ontologies are also referred to as “Tell & Ask Ontologies”.

iii. Indexing Ontologies: For retrieval purposes, this kind of ontologies are used.

iv. Meta-ontology: Meta-ontology is commonly referred to as a “knowledge representation ontology”. This kind of ontologies is heavily used in computer and information science domain to represent domain knowledge.

In figure 1.1 categorization of ontologies (by Mizoguchi and colleagues) has been shown.

Figure 1.1: Categorization of ontologies by Mizoguchi and Colleagues

Figure Reference: (Gomez-Perez A, 2004)

Van Heijst and colleagues (1997) classified ontologies in a completely different way. According to them there exist two “orthogonal dimensions” to classify ontologies, which are:

i. The amount and type of structure of the conceptualization: In this case, the major focus of consideration is on the structure of things. It means whether the ontology aims to conceptualize few terminologies (e.g. lexicons) or information (e.g. database) or domain knowledge (e.g. knowledge modeling).

ii. The subject of conceptualization: In this case, there are mainly four kinds of ontologies. Domain, generic, application and representational. Domain Ontologies are specific to a domain knowledge and reusable only in that domain. Generic Ontologies are not bounded to a domain, hence it could be used and reused across domains. Application Ontologies are specific to an application. Its scope is very narrow, it is non-reusable. The Representational Ontologies formalizes or represents knowledge in such a way that a computer system can understand those concepts. There are lots of applications of this kind of ontologies in the area of artificial intelligence. In figure 1.2 this categorization (by Heijst and colleagues) has been shown.

Figure 1.2: Categorization of ontologies by Heijst and Colleagues

Figure Reference: (Gomez-Perez A, 2004)

Guarino (1997) classified ontologies mostly into four classes on the basis of their level of dependence on a particular task or point of view. These different levels are:

i. Top-level Ontology: These ontologies are used for general-purpose, which is not dependent on any particular problem or domain, and generally describe concepts like object, state, action, etc. Top-level ontologies are also referred to as “Generic Ontologies” (van Heijst, Schreiber, & Wielinga, 1997), “Abstract ontologies” (Borst & Borst, 1997), “Upper (level) ontologies” (Guarino, 1998) or “Foundation(al) Ontologies” (Schneider, 2003).

ii. Domain Ontology: Domain ontologies define general domain knowledge. It does not focus on a particular task or application but tries to target a wide range of different task and application relevant to a particular domain. The major goal of this kind of ontology is applicability within the scope of particular domain expertise (Marquardt, Morbach, Wiener, & Yang, 2010).

iii. Task Ontology: Task ontologies are responsible to perform a particular task or in other words to solve a specific kind of problem. Generally, it depends on some methods which can solve a problem or complete a task. Usually, it is also referred to as “Method ontology”. Task ontologies are specific to a task but not to any particular domain. It could be reusable across domains.

iv. Application Ontology: As the name suggests these ontologies are specific to an application. The scope of this kind of ontologies is narrow. Often it is misunderstood as a knowledge-base. To solve this misconception Guarino (1997) proposed the following definition: “An application ontology comprises only state-independent information (i.e., facts that are always true), whereas a knowledge base may also hold state-dependent information (i.e., facts and assertions related to a particular state of affairs)”(p. 139-170).

These four types of ontologies are interdependent. According to Borst & Borst (1997) and Guarino (1997), top-level ontologies could be reusable in task ontology and domain ontology. In this way, it is possible to use the same world view as top-level ontologies by the other two. For task ontologies, it is very common to use the same terminologies as the top-level ontology to solve a problem/task. Domain ontologies can also describe a domain knowledge in the guidance of a top-level ontology. An application ontology may use a concept from all other kinds of ontologies. In figure 1.3 this phenomenon has been shown.

Figure 1.3: Categorization and connection of ontologies by Guarino

Figure Reference: (Gomez-Perez A, 2004)

Mizoguchi (2003) has classifiedy ontologies into two different types:

i. Light-weigrt Ontology: According to wikipedia, it is a knowledge organization system “in which concepts are connected by rather general associations than strict formal connections” (“Lightweight_ontology”, 2017, para. 1). Furt and Trichet (2006) defines it as “an ontology simply based on a hierarchy of concepts and a hierarchy of relations” (p.38). Associative network and multilingual classifications could be concidered as examples of this kind of ontology.

ii. Heavy-weight Ontology: According to Furt and Trichet (2006) it is a kind of light-weight ontology but, “enriched with axioms used to fix the semantic interpretation of concepts and relations. Such an ontology can be a domain ontology, an ontology of representation, an ontology of PSM, etc.” (p.38).

1.7 Ontology Development Methodologies:

Ontology development is referred to as ontology engineering or ontology building process. In the last two decades, several methodologies have been developed for ontology engineering. Although there are different kinds of methodologies, the basic nature of all them is more or less the same (Gasevic, Djuric, & Devedzic, 2009). These methodologies are based on some “established principles, processes and practices”. There are several surveys on ontology development methodologies. Some of the major contributors have been done by Jones et al. (1998), Corcho et al. (2003) and Staab and Studer (2009). Gasevic D et al. (2009) summarises about ontology development methodologies as:

• “most ontology development methodologies that have been proposed a focus on building ontologies;
• some other methodologies also include methods for merging, reengineering, maintaining, and evolving ontologies;
• yet other methodologies build on general software development processes and practices and apply them to ontology development;
• there are also methodologies that exploit the idea of reusing existing ontological knowledge in building new ontologies;
• some of the more recently proposed methodologies are based on the idea of using publicly available community-based knowledge to simplify and speed-up development of ontologies.” (p. 66)

There is no ‘ONE’ best way to build an ontology because ontologies are basically built to arrange domain knowledge and there could be several ways to model a domain knowledge or for different purposes. Jones et al. (1998) in their study, tried to find out the common stages of ontology building. They have noted there are manly two stages to this process. The first stage produces an informal description of the ontology. The second stage is focused on its formal embodiment in an ontology language. The Open Semantic Framework (2014) noted “The existence of these two descriptions is an important characteristic of many ontologies, with the informal description often carrying through to the formal description” (para. 4).

Noy and McGuinness (2001) have given step by step guidelines for creating ontologies. They are as follows:

i. Determine the domain and scope of the ontology: It means, before developing any ontology there should be a clear vision about the coverage of the ontology. Not only that, the purpose and goal of that ontology have to be defined beforehand. What kind of queries the ontology can answer and how to maintain the growth and development of that ontology needs to be pre-planned before starting the ontology building process.

ii. Consider reusing existing ontologies: Nowadays there are many ontology libraries available, where one can find many readymade ontologies on several topics which can be reused. So before starting the ontology development process, it is always a better idea to search for a similar ontology if someone has already created. Then it is always possible to refine and extend that ontology according to a chosen domain or task. In this case, a few issues have to be taken care of, like; language conversion, interoperability, and tool support.

iii. Enumerate important terms in the ontology: This step is about collecting all related terms and providing their definition and relations.

iv. Define the classes and the class hierarchy: This step suggests to build a hierarchical relationship with the classes. It can be done with several different approaches like (Gasevic, Djuric, & Devedzic, 2009):

a. Top-down: In this process, the focus of identifying classes goes generic to specific.

b. Bottom-up: In this process, the focus of identifying classes goes specific to generic.

c. Middle-out: In this method, the ontology building process starts with some important middle-layer concepts and then concepts from the top and bottom layers keep adding in the hierarchical structure.

v. Combination of these approaches: Combination of all or any of the three techniques mentioned above could also be a useful method for ontology building.

vi. Define the properties of classes (slots): In this part, the internal structure has to be defined. To do the job, it is necessary to explain all primary and secondary properties of a given class and establish relations among those classes.

vii. Define the facets of the slots: A class could have different kinds of values. Every facet (e.g. name, number) of those values have to be defined.

viii. Create instances: In the last step, the slot values have to be fulfilled by each instance created for the classes.

OpenSemanticFramework.org (2014) mentions about two common ontology development methodologies with two different diagrams. One of them is developed by Simperl and Colleagues (2006) (Figure 1.4)and another one is developed by Corcho and Colleagues (2003) (Figure 1.5), which are as follows:

Figure 1.4: Ontology development methodology by Simperl and Colleagues Ontology Managem

Diagram Source: http://wiki.opensemanticframework.org/index.php/Ontology_Development_MethodologiesDiagram Source: http://wiki.opensemanticframework.org/index.php/Ontology_Development_Methodologies

1.8 Ontology Development Tools:

Ontology building is a time-consuming affair. It is a challenge to implement an ontology language without any supporting tool. Hence there are several ontology development tools. According to Michael K. Bergman (2010), there are as many as 185 ontology tools available on the web. Each of the tools serves different goals. A list of popular ontology tools is enlisted in appendix A. For the purpose of this work we have used “Protégé”, which is most popular, to describe and represent an “Integrated Ontology For Information Resource Description”. Hence a small overview of Protégé is given below:

1.8.1 Protege: An Overview:

Wikipedia (2016) defines Protégé is a “free, open source ontology editor and a knowledge management system” (para. 1). It provides an environment to build domain knowledge with the help of ontologies. Protégé implements a rich set of knowledge-modeling structures and actions that support the creation, visualization, and manipulation of ontologies in various representation formats. Protégé can be customized to provide domain-friendly support for creating knowledge models and data entry. Further, the functionalities of Protégé can be extended using plug-in architecture and a Java-based Application Programming Interface (API) for building knowledge-based tools and applications.

Protégé is compliant with the W3C standards. It provides a simple, customizable user interface with several facilities like; change tracking, revision history, multiple upload/download formats and it is optimized for collaboration. Protégé is available in both desktop and web versions. The current (2017) desktop version is called Protégé 5.2.0. Protégé desktop versions are downloadable at “http://protege.stanford.edu/products.php” and it runs on any platform like; Windows, Linux or MAC. It is the leading ontology development tool with more than 300000 registered users. Features include:

• Language: Protégé supports knowledge base entry in any language or character set but the tool itself is offered in English.
• Database: Protégé supports any database that has a JDBC driver. In practice, this means most relational databases including Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Access are supported by Protégé.

1.8.2 Why Protégé?

i. It is Open Source.

ii. It provides infrastructure to build taxonomy as well as attributes of classes.

iii. It is a very good tool to implement relationships among classes. iv. It allows using instances which leads to building a strong knowledge base.

v. It provides several output options (e.g. OWL, RDF Schema, XML, HTML).

vi. Components are reusable.

vii. It supports connecting to the databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL). Hence, one can easily extract data from the database.

viii. Different useful plug-ins (e.g. View Plug-ins: OntoGraf, Import Plug-ins: ProtegeLOV, Reasoner Plug-in: RacerProTG, etc.) are available.

ix. Supports data transport via XSL Sheet.

x. Easy to install.

xi. User-friendly documentations are available.

xii. Mail forum support is very strong.

xiii. Platform independent support.

xiv. Large and Active community.

xv. Continuously updating.

1.9 Conclusion:

As it is mentioned in the methodology, an understanding of ontology is essential for this work. Hence, this chapter provides an overall idea of ontologies. It could be treated as a part of the “study of the subject” of this work also. The concept of ontology has been described along with different aspects of it. It started with a general understanding of ontology followed by the reasons why one should use ontology. After that, a historical perspective and definitions of ontology have been provided. An account of ontological components, types, methodologies, languages, and tools have been described to enrich the understanding of ontologies.

Original Reference Article/ Collected From:

• Biswas, S. (2017). Integrated ontology for information resource description.

The post Ontology: meaning and definition appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Definition of Disability:

Disability means ‘incapacity to perform any activities in the usual or within the range considered normal for a human being’. A disability (or lack of a given ability, as the “dis” qualifier denotes) in humans may be physical, cognitive/mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or some combination of these.

A common man can see with eyes, hear with ears, perform tasks, speak with tongue and takes decision with the brain. Malfunction of one or more organs leads to disability or multiple disability problems. Basically, when most people think of the word “disability” they immediately picture someone in a wheelchair. But there are many different types of disability.

People with a disability may include:

a. people who are blind or partially sighted

b. people with learning or intellectual disabilities

c. people who are deaf or hearing impaired

d. people with a physical disability

e. people with long term illnesses

f. people with mental health or psychological difficulties

g. people with an acquired brain injury

The most commonly cited definition is that of the World Health Organization in 1976 which draws a three-fold distinction between impairment, disability, and handicap, defined as follows. ‘An impairment is any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function; a disability is any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being; a handicap is a disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or a disability, that prevents the fulfillment of a role that is considered normal (depending on age, sex, and social and cultural factors) for that individual’.

According to activists in the disability movement, the World Health Organization has confused between the terms ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’. They maintain that impairment refers to physical or cognitive limitations that an individual may have, such as the inability to walk or speak. In contrast, disability refers to socially imposed restrictions, that is, the system of social constraints that are imposed on those with impairments by the discriminatory practices of society.

Thus, the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation defined impairment and disability in the following manner. An ‘impairment [is] lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body”. ‘disability [is] the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities’

According to the United Nations Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with disabilities:

• The term “disability” summarizes a great number of different functional limitations occurring in any population in any country, of the world. People may be disabled by physical, intellectual or sensory impairment, medical conditions or mental illness. Such impairments, conditions or illnesses may be permanent or transitory in nature.

• The term “handicap” means the loss or limitation of opportunities to take part in the life of the community on an equal level with others. It describes the encounter between the person with a disability and the environment. The purpose of this term is to emphasize the focus on the shortcomings in the environment and in many organized activities in society, for example, information, communication, and education, which prevent persons with disabilities from participating on equal terms.

• The use of the two terms “disability” and “handicap”, as defined in the two paragraphs above, should be seen in the light of modern disability history. During the 1970s there was a strong reaction among representatives of organizations of persons with disabilities and professionals in the field of disability against the terminology of the time. The terms “disability” and “handicap” were often used in an unclear and confusing way, which gave poor guidance for policy-making and for political action. The terminology reflected a medical and diagnostic approach, which ignored the imperfections and deficiencies of the surrounding society.

• In 1980, the World Health Organization brought out a manual on International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps, 59 made a clear distinction among “impairment”, “disability” and “handicap”. and suggested a more precise and at the same time relativistic approach, It has been extensively used in areas such as rehabilitation, education, statistics, policy, legislation, demography, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Some users have expressed concern that the Classification, in its definition of the term “handicap”, may still be considered too medical and too centered on the individual, and may not adequately clarify the interaction between societal conditions or expectations and the abilities of the individual. Those concerns and others expressed by users during the 12 years since its publication, will be addressed in forthcoming revisions of the Classification.

• As a result of experience gained in the implementation of the World Programme of Action and of the general discussion that took place during the United Nations Decade of Disabled Persons, there was a deepening of knowledge and extension of understanding concerning disability issues and the terminology used. Current terminology recognizes the necessity of addressing both the individual needs (such as rehabilitation and technical aids) and the shortcomings of the society (various obstacles for participation).

In this concern, it may be mentioned that a ‘disability’ includes those that:

• are present, or

• Once existed but do not have any more, for example, a person who has had a back injury, a heart attack or an episode of mental illness, earlier,

• may develop in the future, for example, a person with a genetic predisposition to a disease, such as Huntington’s disease or heart disease or a person who is HIV positive, or

• Someone thinks or assumes a person has.

Types of disability:

Human beings can see with their eyes, hear with ears, perform tasks, with muscles speak with tongue and take decision with brain malfunction of one or more organs lead to disability or multiple disability problems. Disabilities can be broadly classified as follows.

1. Loco Motor (LM)
2. Deaf and Dumb (DD)
3. Hearing Handicapped (HH)
4. Visual Impairment (VI)
5. Mentally Retarded (MR)

1. Loco-motor Disability: Loco-motor Disability is defined as a person’s inability to executive activities associated with moving both himself & objects from place to place & such inability resulting from the affection of musculoskeletal and/or nervous system.

2. Speech & Hearing Disability: A person with hearing impairment hearing difficulty of various degrees in hearing sounds is an impairment person.

3. Visually Disability: Blindness refers to a condition where a person suffers from any of the following condition:

• Total absent of sought or

• Visual acuity not exceeding 6/60 or20/200 (smells) in the better eye with best-correcting lenses or

• Limitation of the field of visual subtending on the angle of 10 degrees or worse

4. Low vision: person with low vision means a person with impairment of vision of less than 6/18 to 6/60 with best correction in the better eye or impairment of field in any one of the following:

• Reduction of the fields less than 50 degrees

• Hemianopia with macular involvement

• Altitudinal defect involving lower fields

5. Mental Retardation: Mental retardation is a condition of arrested or incomplete development of the mind which is especially characterized by impairment of skill manifested during the development periods which contributed to the overall level of intelligence i.e. cognitive, language, motor, and social abilities

There are various factors which are responsible for the loco-motor disability:

• Diseases like polio, cerebral palsy, Leprosy

• Physical defects or deformity of the body or limb (orthopedics problem ) and

• Amputation due to the accident.

On the other hand, it must be mentioned that “The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014” [clause (x) of section.2] states:-

19 conditions of disability including definitions such as: autism; low vision and blindness; cerebral palsy; deaf-blindness; hemophilia; hearing impairment; leprosy; intellectual disability; mental illness; muscular dystrophy; multiple sclerosis; learning disability; speech and language disability; sickle cell disease; thalassemia; chronic neurological conditions; and multiple disability. Persons with benchmark disabilities are defined as those with at least 40 per cent of any of the above specified disabilities.

This bill of 2014, also categorized ‘disabled persons’ in three ways, as:

i) “Person with benchmark disability” means a person with not less than forty per cent. of a specified disability where specified disability has not been defined in measurable terms and includes a person with disability where specified disability has been defined in measurable terms, as certified by the certifying authority;

ii) “person with disability” means a person with long term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairment which hinder his full and effective participation in society equally with others;

iii) “person with disability having high support needs” means a person with benchmark disability certified under clause (a) of sub-section (2) of section 57 who needs high support; (s) “prescribed” means prescribed by rules made under this Act; (0 “reasonable accommodation” means necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments, without imposing a disproportionate or undue burden in a particular case, to ensure to persons with disabilities the enjoyment or exercise of rights equally with others.

Needs of the disabled persons in a library:

Individuals with a disability have varying degrees of needs. Their needs are just like those who are not disabled. They often strive hard for a high quality of life as other normal individuals. Unfortunately many times people fail to understand that disability in simple terms is nothing but a natural part of the human experience. Often they are shrouded by misconceptions such as, that the disabled persons are forced to lead a poor quality of life. But the fact is, a person with a disability with all limitations can carry out normal activities of living if they have easy access to community-based on long term services such as attendant care, accesses to buildings, public transportation, sidewalks, etc. Even the severely disabled persons, when provided with quality health care services and the necessary equipment are able to carry on the tasks similar to those done by the non-disabled. One cannot but feel disturbed that in spite of having the capacity they have to continue remaining disabled persons because of lack of a strong community-based support system. A disabled person who is in the prime of his youth, demands an equal opportunity and must, therefore, be offered a range of assistance such as examination support, specialized equipment, library assistance, note-taking in class, reader sign interpreters and parking provisions, etc. Only when they have strong support such as the ones mentioned above they can hope to lead normal lives.

A library should contain the following assistive devices for the disabled persons:

• Screen Reader & Magnifier
• Braille Printer
• Braille Display Keyboard
• JAWS Screen Reader
• Kurzweil 3000
• Cranktop Tables
• Scanner
• Natural Speaking
• Supernova
• Readit wand
• NVDA & Braille embosser (printer)
• Talking typing
• Daisy book reader (for e-books)
• Special keyboard (large font with florescent yellow keys)
• Magnifier mouse
• Seika Cell Braille display (stop anytime to correct spellings)
• BAT (single hand keyboard)
• Foot mouse (slipper mouse) with programmable paddle
• Device to make a normal book
• Adjustable high power optical lens
• Photocopying Machine

Role of a library for disabled persons:

We have discussed in this chapter the prevailing situation in information support services in relation to the user community with a disability. Our Indian constitution is pledging equality irrespective of class, caste & sex, etc, we have the disability act, equal opportunity in all spheres of lives for the disabled. Our library laws which ensure the right to information irrespectively, but the actual scenarios are as follows:

As a user of library & information services to consider the disabled people, most of the public libraries are not available wheelchair and not included within the curricula as special service to the disabled. There is not a positive guideline for helping disabled people.

Public libraries, academic libraries and Institute libraries must stress on the need for equality to access for the disabled person in general & disabled student in particular. The librarian must liaise with the coordinator of the organization working for the person with a disability for necessary information.

• The Librarian has a special responsibility to address to service to a person with disability & not regulated to the disabled user.

• Information Technology is used for the disabled user.

• Popular guide line accessible disabled user.

• Public libraries can act as a referral center by developing a collection as a disabled issue.

• To prepare a list of the relevant website for reference for disabled people.

• Ensure that every child with disabilities has access to free education.

• Endeavor to promote the integration of student with a disability in the normal school.

• Promote setting up a special school in Govt. & private sector for those in need of special education.

• Endeavor to equip the special school for persons with disabilities with vocational training facilities.

All through the new act with help to develop positive action programme. There is no positive guideline for helping the disabled to have access to an effective library & information services programme. If the low offer them equal opportunities they must also ensure that people serving the disabled such as the Govt. & NGOs find a new way of serving the disabled. However the library & information professional can play their part to hasten the process of full & total integration of the disabled in the society.

A disabled persons who is in the prime of his youth demands an equal opportunity and must therefore be offered a range of assistance such as examination support, specialized equipment, library assistance, note-taking in class, reader sign interpreters and parking provision etc only when they have a strong support such as the ones mentioned above they can hope to lead normal lives.

Creating a model library programme for disabled persons:

In order to create an efficient and effective library programme for the differently-able persons, libraries need managers who are up to date and are aware of the latest developments that are likely to have profound effect on their services. It is their collective responsibility to promote quality services by gaining a good insight into the problems faced by the disabled persons. Library-staff must recognize that some of the disabled persons have no control over their behavior and therefore they have to be competent enough to handle difficult situations. They should be prepared to give individual attention so as to understand their strongest communication mode. Therefore the following aspects are essential to develop a model library programme for them by way of:

a) Training the Library staff,

b) Developing User Assistance Schemes,

c) Offering Special Services.

A model library can perform its duty by providing some assistive devices to the disabled people, such as-

1. Provide primary introduction and help to the disabled persons with using assistive technology software like Read &Write, SuperNova (SuperNova is a screen reader and magnifier to aid those with visual impairments to use Windows applications) etc. which can assist visually challenged students by magnifying and reading back text.

2. Provide assistance with using equipment like Braille embosser, CCTV reader (25″ Color CCTV), Scanner, Kurzweil 3000 which is used in conjunction with a scanner to read out scanned text. Zoom OPAC facility must be available.

3. Photocopying services for articles or chapters from books, including enlarged version (within permissible copyright restrictions) with computer print outs.

4. Assistance with locating materials by the trained library staffs.

5. Flexible & longer loan periods.

6. Allow the disabled students to authorize their supporting or helping workers to borrow books, collect holds or photocopying receipts and pay fines on their behalf.

7. Provide assistance with the use of library computers, catalogs, literature indexes, microform readers, or other library equipment.

8. Meet their reference questions in a kind manner.

9. Provide assistance with printing from library computers with emailing search results.

10. Help in filling out an interlibrary loan, document delivery, reserve, or search requests.

11. In the absence of Reference Desk staff, Circulation Services staff will help as per their limit. Reference assistance is available by calling a reference desk or by email.

12. The Librarians can provide advice on print and electronic resources for specific subject areas.

Training for Library and Information Staff:

Library profession always needs cordial assistance for serving the users in a better way. So, professional library services depend largely on the continuous upgrading of staff through methodical training on a regular basis. It could be fortnightly, monthly, or seasonal training. Special training requirements can be determined by the Library management and training Officers depending upon the skills and training needs of the individuals. Once the need has been assessed the method of training can be planned. Here is a simple and effective training plan that can be implemented:

Objective:

To familiarize with important aspects of disability and disabled users in a Library environment.

Structure:

A five-day course of lectures, discussions and practical work. The practical training could be held in small groups giving each group an opportunity to work with all types of disabled users.

Materials:

A resource package of the training manual.

Contents:

• Concepts on disability: (visits to hospitals, centers for the blind and other kinds of handicapped persons).

• Developing communication and counseling skills.

• Professional library services, a single line of command, the concentration of effort, time-bound work, field orientation and linkage with research.

• Case studies.

In training and work review, session’s staff of all levels can report and discuss their successes from which lessons may be drawn.

This article collected from:

• Das, A. (2017). Information support for the development of disabled persons with special reference to the people of East Midnapore a district of West Bengal India.

The post Library Services for Disabled Persons appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) in Education

Technological resources that are available for teaching and learning include computer hardware and software in addition to CD-ROM and electronic communication media. The rapidly changing the nature of computer technology continues to a wide range of resources available for any subject-specific learning. Technology has an important role in every aspect of modern life. The technological device finds its usage every day. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has become universal. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is connected with various fields like business, transport, schools, etc. It uses Blogs, social websites, web pages and so on. It supported that majority of present day’s formal learning is delivered using one or more of the following methods; a) the classroom model of learning, b) technology-based learning and c) blended learning (Richardson, 2002).

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) increase motivation, achievement and students’ learning opportunity. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can also assist the students in acquiring essential occupational skills. The use of computers in the learning environment has been growing and its applications are indispensable to computers in education today and into the future. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is changing the face of the contemporary World. Liberalization, Privatisation, Globalization are closely related to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its strategy of a nation is very crucial to put it on a global map. Introducing Information and Communication Technologies into a rural area though got disrupted at times, happened smoothly at every site.

Though India is all set to widely utilize the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related services, there are a few crucial aspects to be improved;

• The requirement of paying the attention to e-security in India that covers the cyber forensics, computer, and cybersecurity, etc.
• The cyber law in India also imposes certain restrictions and their violations could take the form of offenses and the contraventions.
• The establishment of a digital evidencing base is the absolute requirement in India. The same is missing for the time being.
• There is also a need for judicial reforms in India keeping in mind the requirements of information and communication technology.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based educational communication has enormous advantages in the education sector. Most importantly, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) eradicates the barriers of time and place in the learning situation. The selection of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education is due to its user-friendliness, speed, accuracy, high reliability, high storage capacity, integrity, consistency, logicality, versatility, low failure rate, durability, and the probability; above all, it has the special characteristic of interactivity which gives the control to the students.

Hence, with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based educational communication, the student decides when, where and how much content of the subject to receive on par with the availability of time. The learners take their own time for learning concepts depending upon their ability with information and communication technology (ICT) based technology. In short, it encourages student autonomy. This Grey Revolution is matched with real-life teaching-learning situations in the field of education. The entire educational activity becomes learner-centric and learning-centric.

According to Delor’s Commission Report (1996), To be in tune with the paradigm shift that world of education has witnessed, any teacher at any level of education must adapt his/her relationship with the learners, switching roles from the ‘soloist’ to ‘accompanist’ and shifting the emphasis from dispensing information to helping the learners seek, organize and manage knowledge, guiding them rather than the molding item”.

At present, the modern teachers are entrusted with two crucial roles: one that of use of the overabundance of materials and services available on the net for effective teaching and that of a developer of e-content, Blog and e-resources for the learning of the student community of present and the future.

Today the teachers have to aware of services like search engines, e-mail, chat, e-libraries, and digital libraries, e-journals, e-books, e-dictionaries, and digital dictionaries, e-forum, an e-learning portal, maintaining social websites like Facebook, Twitter, Blog, downloadable software, online storage, etc.

If a teacher needs to evolve into an e-content developer, the teacher could make use of authoring tools, integrating tools, dissemination tools, and on-line storage and preservation tools of the infinitive services available on the internet.

Teachers and students could use the following educational tools for the effective teaching-learning process.

• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Applets

a. Blogging: Blogs are a set of chronologically represented news entries and can be used to publish the personal opinions, diary-like articles or news stories relating to a particular interest or product. The authors or the people who publish the articles in Blog sites are called as Bloggers. Adding the article in the Blog is called Blogging.

b. Podcasting: “Podcasting” word was coined by 2004, it consists of two words: “iPod” and “broadcasting”. It is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos, over the Internet, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. The term podcast means both the content and the method of delivery. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. Pod casters’ web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their files.

c. Applets: An applet is the program written in the Java Programming language that can be included in an HTML page, much in the same way an image is included in the page. Though the internet offers many useful options and easy to use the technologies in the form of services and the software, what is required today is a change in the mindset of teaching community to embrace these new technologies and make the best of it not only for the larger benefit of the learning community but also for the professional and the personal enrichment. “It is true that the technology cannot replace a teacher, but it is also true that a teacher who does not use the technology will be replaced by the website”.

This Article Collect From:

• Vimalkumar, P. (2010). Effectiveness of blog based learning in Physics at Higher secondary level.

The post Impact of ICT in Education appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1. 1 Introduction: E-learning may be defined as ‘the instruction delivered via a computer that is intended to promote learning’. E-learning is commonly referred to as the international use of networked Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. It may be considered as a backbone for all educational programs and includes online learning, virtual learning, distributed learning, web-based learning, Blog based learning, etc.

According to UNESCO, E-learning is described as “The tool and the processes to access, retrieve, store, organize, manipulate, produce, present and exchange information by the electronic and other automated means. These include the devices hardware, digital cameras, phones, faxes, modems, CD and DVD players and recorders, digitized video/radio and T.V. programs database programs and multimedia programmes”.

In the term E-learning, “E” stands for “Electronic”. E-learning would be incorporated all educational activities that are carried out by the individuals or groups working online or offline and synchronously or asynchronously via network or stand-alone computer and other electronic devices.

Individualized self-paced E-learning online refers to situations where an individual student is accessing learning resources such as the database or course content online via an Intranet or the Internet. For example, this is a learner studying alone or conducting some research on the Internet or a local network.

Individualized self-paced E-learning offline refers to situations where an individual learner by using the learning resources such as the database or the computer-assisted learning package offline (i.e. while not connected Intranet or Internet).

Group-based E-learning synchronously refers to situations where groups of learners work together in real-time via an Intranet or the Internet. It can be included text-based conferencing and one or two-way audio and video conferencing. For examples, this includes learners engaged in a real-time chat or an audio-video conference. Group-based E-learning asynchronously refers to the situations where groups of learners are working over an Internet or the Internet where exchange among the participants occurs with a time delay (i.e., not in real-time). For example, online discussions via electronic mailing lists and text-based conferencing within the learning management systems.

With the use of information and communication technology, E-learning has acquired a formidable placed within the academic system. Corporate E-learning is growing rapidly. E-mail is a familiar one which is accepted by the users similarly E-banking, E-commerce, E-business, E-trading and providing a new dimension in the technology. E-learning is broader than on-line. Separate e-learning is available for distance education, which includes printed materials as well as electronic materials. For educators, e-learning technologies promise more efficient and hassle-free alternatives for the preparation of teaching materials, evaluation of students’ progress as well as the performance and management of classroom data and statistics (Saravanan & Shanmughavel, 2007; Ruiz, Mintzer& Leipzig, 2006).

1.2 Concept of E-Learning:

E-learning may be described as interactive learning in which the learning content of the subject is available on-line and provides spontaneous feedback to the students learning activities. E-learning covers the applications and processes, like web-based learning, Blog based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classrooms, and digital collaboration. It comprises the delivery of the content of the subject via the Internet, intranet/extranet, satellite broadcast, interactive television, CD-ROM, DVD, audio, videotape, etc.

E-learning may be described as instructional content of the subject or learning experiences given or enabled by the e – technology. It is a structured and interactive approach to educate the students or informing the students, teachers, etc.

1.3 Need for E-Learning:

People has different perspectives regarding E-learning. The specific need relate to, significantly determines the approach to E-learning. Hence, it is essential to discuss the need for E-learning.

• In many subjects, the lack of qualified teachers is the problem faced by educational institutions. The availability of quality teachers also another major problem. The school managements are not interested in giving an attractive salary, and their unwillingness to retain quality teachers has led to a poor academic environment. Due to this pathetic condition, the number of young people aspiring for the teaching profession has decreased drastically in the recent past. It is equally unfortunate to observe the Indian educational sector, in which hardly anyone looks at E-learning as an alternative to traditional teaching. This lack of effort to adopt information and communication technology (ICT) based teaching-learning methods has limited the reach of the available teachers.
• Learners need to come together at a particular place at a particular time is a major problem. This is true for those who are studying courses as part-time, the just-in-time learners, adult learners, distance learner, etc. the freedom to connect to the course setup at any time from anywhere is a major advantage for e-learning. It also enables the students to take to studying when feels is the best time for the students to study and hence provides for adapting the teaching-learning process to the student’s individual characteristics.
• When teaching explored in a good manner, e-learning enables a high level of personalization and a wide range of teaching methods. Conducive environment, multimedia capability, and high-end visualization support enable the student to relate to the subject more depth, because of which the pupil is able to understand the subjects well.
• In India, content contributors on the website are less, obviously, since very few of our teachers are touch with online. While ones use an online package from various sources, one rarely considers contributing work to share others. Adopting E-learning enables and encourages one to do this naturally; some once work is already online, perhaps with a limited reach and once is comfortable with this, it is a small step to reach out to the universe.
• If a person tries to practicing e-learning, one would be developing much of the content course material electronically. These are much reusable compared to written notes of the content. These could be shared with another instructor, could be improved over the years using user feedback and hence results in good quality of the content material.
• Incorporating the assessment of the learner and other activities under e-learning enables to collect much more detailed feedback on different aspects of the course. These include the quality of questions, quality of content, qualitative judgment on learners’ performance, etc. these can be used to improve the quality of the teaching at an institutional level.
• The distribution of e-learning could address many concerns including the content creation, content delivery, content assessment, content collaboration and content communication between the teachers and students and among the students, etc. in addition, support for e-assessment could be needed mechanisms to keep the track of marks per student per assessment and also calculating appropriately weighted total. A learning management system (LMS) is the integrated application that provides all these and more under one roof With a login, one could see and access all the relevant aspects of a course. From an administrative view, one would be needed mechanisms to control access to the course allowing valid students and teachers. In general, a person could be a student of a particular subject and a teacher in another subject. Hence, learning management systems (LMS) provide user login mechanisms supporting the role-based access control.

1.4 Steps Involved in E-Learning:

University of Bristol advisors described five steps that lead to E-learning;

i) Need: the First step is to identify the need for e-learning and then working out a strategic plan for the content development and E-learning implementation. Things that need to be answered are:

• Who will be the prospective users of E-learning?
• What are their knowledge needs?
• What does their understanding level of technology that one may use in our E-learning modules? For example, a technical understanding of a school student differs from that of a college student.

ii) Pedagogy: This is the time to reflect upon the pedagogy involved and to re-evaluate and identify the specific learning objectives of the users’ learning. Pedagogy is the art or science of teaching. Pedagogy is also sometimes referred to as the correct use of teaching strategies.

iii) Resources: Identify the resources required, both hardware and software. Review the tools available. Calculate the budget for the overall project and the initial capital outlay.

iv) Creation: This is the main stage of the whole project which involves designing and development. Obtain training and support. Acquire resources to support E-Learning (digital images, video, audio, etc) and finally, effective users induction/training in how to access and use the E-Learning.

v) Evaluation: Evaluate the efficacy of the E-learning by staff and users feedback and, if possible, evaluation by an external examiner.

1.5 Advantages of E-Learning:

• E-Learning materials are benefiting to education, corporations and to all the types of students. It is affordable, time-saving, and produces effective results. E-learning is more cost-effective rather than conventional learning method because of less time and less money is spent on transport. Since E-learning could be done in any geographic location and there are no transport expenses, this kind of learning is much less costly than the traditional method of learning.
• Flexibility is a major advantage of E-learning. E-learning has the advantage of handling classes at any time from anywhere. Learning could occur when and where it is needed. E-learning could be possible at the office, at the home, on the road and 24×7. In E-learning, assessments can be done by which teacher may know what the students have learned, when they would complete the courses, and how the students have performed.
• Students prefer E-learning because it has different kinds of learning styles. Students could be learned at their own pace and also learn through a variety of activities that apply to different learning styles. Students may fit for E-learning into their busy schedule. If the learners have a job, still they could be working with E-learning. If the students want to learn the subject, they can learn even at night. Students may sit in the home and do the learning if they desire.
• E-learning motivates the students to peruse through the information by using hyperlinks and sites on the World Wide Web (WWW). Students are able to search the information relevant to their personal situations and interest. E-learning permits students to select learning materials based on their level of knowledge, interest and what they want to know in order to perform more effectively. E-learning is more focused, flexible and interesting for the student.
• E-learning assists the learner to develop their knowledge through the Internet. This knowledge would be helped to learners throughout their life. E-learning motivates the students to take personal interest and responsibility for their own learning. When learners succeed, it develops self-knowledge and self-confidence in them. Some more major merits of E-learning are given below;

i. Time and location are flexible for learning.

ii. It has a universal teaching phenomenon.

iii. Choosing a large knowledge domain is possible.

iv. E-Learning ensures lifetime learning options.

v. Sharing of knowledge with others is possible.

vi. Remunerations for training and other expenses could be saved.

vii. Access to plenty of information could be received at a low cost.

viii. Uplifting academic productivity.

This Article Collect From:

• Vimalkumar, P. (2010). Effectiveness of blog based learning in Physics at Higher secondary level.

The post E-Learning appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

The word multimedia is derived from the terms, multi and media. Multi means many. Media refers to any hardware or software used for communication. Multimedia is the field concerned with the computer-controlled integration of the text, graphics, drawings, still and moving images (Video), animations, audio, etc., where all kinds of information could be represented, stored, transmitted and processed digitally.

Components of Multimedia:

i) Text: It may be an easy content type to forget when considering the multimedia systems, but the text content is by far the most common media type in the computing applications. Multimedia systems use the combination of text and the other media to deliver functionality. Text in multimedia systems could express specific information, or it could act as reinforcement for the information contained in the other media items. This is the common practice in applications with the accessibility requirements. For example, when web pages include image elements, they could also include the short amount of text for the user’s browser to include as an alternative, in case the digital image item is not available.

a) Hypermedia: Hypermedia, the term derived from hypertext, extends the notion of the hypertext link to include the links among any set of multimedia objects, including the sound, motion video, and virtual reality. It may also suggest a higher level of user/network interactivity than the interactivity already implicit in the hypertext. The World Wide Web (www) is a classic example of hypermedia.

ii) Images: Digital image files appear in many multimedia applications. Digital photographs could display the application content or may alternatively form part of the user interface. Interactive elements, such as buttons, often use custom images created by designers and developers involved in an application. Digital image files use a variety of formats and file extensions. Among the most common are JPEGs and PNGs. Both of these often appear on the websites, as the formats allow developers to minimize on file size while maximizing on picture quality. Graphic design software programs such as Photoshop and Painting are permits developers to create complex visual effects with digital images.

iii) Audio: Audio files and streams play an important role in some multimedia systems. Audio files appear as part of application content and also to aid interaction. When they appear within web applications and sites, audio files sometimes need to be deployed using the plug-in media players. Audio formats include MP3, WMA, Wave, MIDI, and RealAudio. When developers include audio within the website, they will commonly use a compressed format to minimize the download times. Web services could also stream audio so that users can begin playback before the entire file is downloaded.

iv) Video: Digital video appears in many multimedia applications, particularly on the web. As with audio, websites can stream digital video to be increased the speed and the availability of playback. Common digital video formats are including Flash, MPEG, AVI, WMV, and QuickTime. Most digital video requires the use of browser plug-ins to play within the web pages, but in many cases, the user’s browser would already have the required resources installed.

v) Animation: Animated components are common within both the web and desktop multimedia applications. Animations can also include interactive effects, allowing users to engage with the animation action using their mouse and the keyboard. The most common tool for creating animations on the web is Adobe Flash, which also facilitates desktop applications. Using Flash, developers can author FLV files, exporting them as SWF movies for the deployment to users. Flash also uses the Action Script code to achieve animated and interactive effects. vi) Virtual space and beyond Current multimedia systems present the user with a two-dimensional (2-D) graphical user interface. But the future systems can be manipulated three-dimensional information (3-D), associated with the virtual reality (VR) systems. The metaphor for computing would no longer be the desktop but would be virtual spaces filled with the avatars representing people and 3-D objects. The keyboard and the mouse are being replaced by input devices like pen interfaces on personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Multimedia Application:

Multimedia applications can be subdivided into different categories:

1. Information Systems: The major purpose of such systems is to provide information for one or several users. The requested information is typically stored in the databases or media archives. Examples are electronic publishing, online galleries or weather information systems.
2. Remote Representation: By means of a remote representation system a user can take part in or monitor events at a remote location. Important examples are the distance conferencing or lecturing virtual reality or remote robotic agents.
3. Entertainment: This major application area of multimedia technology is strongly oriented towards the audio and video data. Example entertainment applications are digital television, video on demand, distributed games or interactive television.

This Article Collect From:

• Vimalkumar, P. (2010). Effectiveness of blog based learning in Physics at Higher secondary level.

The post Multimedia: It’s Components and Applications appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Blog:

A Blog (weblog) is the type of website or part of the website in which items can be posted and displayed with the newest at the top. Like other media, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news, etc., Some Blogs function as online diaries. Shortly, Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events or the other material such as text, images, audio, video, animation, and graphics. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse – chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, links to other blogs, web pages and the other media related to its topic. The word weblog was coined by “Jorn Barger” in the year 1997. Since its appearance in 1995, Blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world.

The term Blog is a blend of the terms web and log, leading to weblog, weblog, and finally, the term `Blog’ was coined from these terms for reasonable purposes. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing Blog is called Blogging. An Individual article (entry) on a Blog is called “Blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a Blogger. The collective community of Blogs is called Blogosphere. The dynamic capacity of Blogging as a communicative channel for both individual self-expression and social connectivity have fuelled increasing interest in Blogging as an educational resource (Williams & Jacobs, 2004; Burgess, 2006).

The web sites that publish these Blog posts or articles are called Blog sites. Blog sites often provide opinions, commentaries or news on a particular subject, such as food, education, politics, or local news and personal online diaries. Some Blog posts provide a list of links called Blogroll (Agarwal and Liu, 2008). Previously, Blogging was used as a medium for the publication of simple online personal diaries. Online diaries are created and updated by changing the text, photos, or links to other sites. Later, it has the capacity to engage the people in collaborative activities, such as knowledge sharing, reflection, and debate. Currently, Blogging is used in all kinds of domains, such as personal, educational, community, politics, and entertainment.

Since it is a social network, Blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other. There are various types of Blogs, and they focus on different-different niches.

Even though Blogging was launched almost a decade ago, Blogs have been reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled the missions of people to have a voice and connect with others.

The key to the popularity of Blogs is the available scope for user interactivity. Initially, a Blog could be treated by its provider as little more than a news space, and it is not exceptional. Over a period of time, the distinctive style emerged in the course of writing entries and responding to feedback, that reflects the personal character of the Blog creators (Jeremy and Jacob 2004). The semantic web has reached out to all the web users’ communities. Web users are increasingly making use of the different techniques available. Thus, people make use of those tools and Blogging software for sharing information on various topics.

In other words, A weblog may define as “weblog or Blog is a website that consists of a series of entries arranged in reverse chronological order, often updated frequently with new information about particular topics”. The information can be written by the site owner or could have been gathered from other web site or other sources or contributed by users. There are many different types of blogs such as personal Blogs, corporate and organizational Blogs, political Blogs, travel Blogs, project Blogs, music Blogs, moblog, photo Blog, education Blogs, etc.

An edublog is kind of Blog written by someone with a stake in education. Blogs maintained for the purpose of class room instruction, or Blogs written about the educational policy are taken into account for this category. The collection of these Blogs is called the edublogosphere. The explosive growth of Blogs can be attributable to their ease of use, flexibility, and interactivity. First, Blogging technology is easy to use and cost-efficient (Blood, 2004). The origin of Blogging goes further back than the Internet to the days of personal diaries, chronicles and other written forms of personal information. Blogs have become increasingly popular especially among young people. It is reported that more than half (54%) of Bloggers are under the age of 30 (Lenhart& Fox, 2006).

Today, a Blog is considered to be a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual or company. Blogs are typically written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order to the reader. Online media, such as discussion forums and the e-mail lists are also considered to be predecessors to the Blog. In the past decade, Blogs have replaced personnel homepages as the dominant self-publishing vehicle on the internet (Wortham, 2007). Blogs often reflect the personality of the Blogger. To this end, the most accurate and fitting evolution of today’s Blog comes from the online diaries where the diarist would keep an online journal of themselves.

Though these technological changes are acceptable, in many cases some tasks are become tedious to handle the web information effectively. Blogging is the most familiar social web application. The weblog software supports features such as authoring, editing, and the publishing of Blog entries in the Blogosphere. Generally, a Blog contains the title (the main title, or headline of the post), body (main content of the post), permalink (the URL of the full, individual article), and the posted date (date and time the post was published). Blog entries can optionally include comments (Comments allow readers to discuss Blog entries, correcting errors or otherwise expressing their opinions on the post or the post’s subject), categories (or tags) (indexes to subjects discussed by the entry) and Trackback or pingback (links to other sites that refer to the entry).

A typical Blog consists of the following features;

(i) Title of Blog – Main title, or headline, of the post made by the Blogger.

(ii) Main Body – Main content posted by the Blogger.

(iii) Readers Comments – comments added by the readers or viewers.

(iv) Permalink – Blog URL in full, individual article.

(v) Date of Post – Time and date of the post uploaded by the Blogger.

(vi) Categories or tags – Post of the content matter, is discussed.

(vii) Trackback -Blogger may link to other websites.

Role of Blogs in E-Learning:

At present, most of the website users are using social network sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, YouTube and Flickr, for sharing the information. Most of the internet users are also post their comments or feedback, using social networking sites. This is fact especially in the area of Blogs. In general, E – learning would contain the resources relevant to the learning object that would be assisted to the learners. But, when the Blog resources themselves are the learning materials, their contribution is high in terms of their content richness, widespread knowledge resources for the various domains, and free form of the content of the subject publishing. E-learning systems are developed mostly based on the domain application needs; in the same way Blogs could also be organized and manipulated for the needs of implementing E – learning systems.

Types of Blog:

The various categories of Blogs and their descriptions are as follows; Personal Blogs are meant for publishing Bloggers’ personal information. Most of the corporate make use of social interactive sites for sharing their internal communications and discussions; such Blogs are known as corporate or organizational Blogs. Politicians are using the Blogs for e-campaigning. Such kind of Blogs are known as political Blogs. Blogs are not only limited to some specific areas, but cover almost all human involved activities such as travelogs, vlog, photo Blog and education related Blogs. Blogs differ not only in the type of content, but also in the way that content is delivered or written.

Personal Blogs: The personal Blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog.

Corporate and organizational blogs: A Blog can be private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called corporate blogs. Similar Blogs for clubs and societies are called club blogs, group Blogs.

Blog by genre: Some Blogs focus on a particular subject, such as political blogs, travel blogs, house blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs, education blogs, nicheblogs, classical musicblogs, quizzingblogs and legalblogs. Whereas in the case of genre Blogs focusing on literature, art, film or music. Two common types of genre blogs are art blogs and Music Blogs.

Blog by media type: A blog comprising videos is called a vlog, one comprising links is called a linklog, a site containing a portfolio of sketches is called a sketchblog or one comprising photos is called a photoblog. Blog by device Blogs can also be defined by which type of device is used to compose it. A Blog written by a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA could be called a moblog.

Difference between Websites and Blogs:

The website can be differentiated from Blog. A blog allows for easy creation of new pages and new data are entered into a simple form. Whereas, in the case of website which is professional, the creation of new pages is more formal than the Blog. Furthermore, in Blogs adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date or category-based archive are possible. It permits for easy filtering of content for various presentations: by date, category, author, or other attributes.

Table 2.1 Shows the differences between the websites and Blogs

This Article Collect From:

• Vimalkumar, P. (2010). Effectiveness of blog based learning in Physics at Higher secondary level.

The post Blog and it’s role in e-learning appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

EduBlog and it’s features

The usage of Blogs has become popular in educational institutions including public schools and colleges. Blogs can be important tools for sharing useful information and tips among co-workers, dispersing information to students, or keeping in contact with parents. Teachers can create, monitor and edit Blogs to ensure that the postings are relevant and pertain to the classroom. With weblogs, students can find themselves writing for a real audience that, apart from the teacher, may include their peers and students from other classes (Bruns& Jacobs, 2006).

There are various teacher-related Blogs on the internet where teachers are able to share information with one another. This may include specific content that they are working on in their classroom or lessons that they wish to share with other teachers. It is a tool for the educators to share their ideas with one another on what work has been done with students and what has not. Teachers may often depend on these sources to communicate with one another regarding any issues in education. In this way, the Blog often acts as a support system for teachers where they can retrieve ideas, tools, gain support and recognition from other professionals in their field. Some of these Blogs have become recognized as useful tools, especially teachers Blogs which could directly be making a difference in the educational system. For example, Anthony Mullen’s Blog, is about the teacher traveling, discussing dropout rates and sharing his experience with others.

Teachers use Blogs as a way to communicate and enhance classroom teaching among their students. It is easy to introduce the use of Blogs in the classroom and permits both the teacher and student the ability to edit and add content at any time from anywhere. The ability of both the teacher and student to edit the subject content allows for study to take place outside the classroom environment. Blogs maximize the exposure with other students from around the country or world while improving writing and communication skills. It is found that Blogs can be used to promote writing skills of students in different societies (Tekinarslan, 2008). Teachers are using the Blogs as a way to post important information such as homework, important dates (exams, assignments, seminar, etc.), missed lessons, projects, discussion boards, and other useful classroom information that is accessible by all. Students could access this information from home, or from any computer that is connected with the Internet. Studies have shown that Blogging, a tool of Web 2.0, may be used effectively for educational purposes (Ferdig& Trammell, 2004; O’Donnell, 2006; Xie, Ke& Sharma, 2008; Sollars, 2007; Philip & Nicholls, 2009; Hourigan& Murray, 2010).

Students could use Blogs to communicate with other students for doing group projects. Students could also access the Blog to ask each other questions regarding a missed assignment or the lesson. It also gives students an opportunity to collaborate on poetry, various writing assignments, or readings. Students can respond initially to the text, including their thoughts, feelings, connections, questions, etc. Other students would have the opportunity to respond to others and react to these responses. This would be generated conversation among the students and develop their critical and analytical thinking skills. It also permits students who are shy and reserved in the class to voice their opinions and insight using the different approach. With the use of Blogs in the classroom, students learn various things from one another and individually express themselves as well. Yue and Brooks’ (2007) study, Blogging may be perceived as a valuable asset, enhancing learning strategies of large cohort university teaching. However, this tool is not free from some negativity due to its mandatory nature of tasks and requirement of more explicit directions and validation in the writing of students’ own academic Blogs (Hourigan& Murray, 2010).

The use of Blogs in education gives students a global perspective. Teachers from different areas, states, countries, and continents are able to collaborate on different projects and learnings. For instance, a classroom in India can collaborate with classrooms in Norway, Canada, Australia, Cuba, etc. with just a few clicks of a button. Learning through Blogs permits the students to take control of their own learning and steer it to their own needs. Students are able to see that the opinions and even strategies vary based on the location and culture. Children are from different situations, but a common thread of learning can unite them. The use of Blogs in the classroom embeds technological literacy in the children that will help them in adulthood.

Teachers and parents could also use Blogs in order to communicate with one another. Information can be posted for parents on special events occurring in the classroom such as field trips, celebrations, and presentations. Blogging is also a central tool for parents to find out daily assignments so that they can check up on their children and classroom expectations. Having this clear and open communication between the parents and students can ensure success. Assisting parents on what is developmentally appropriate for their children on a Blog could open communication and help parenting skills as well. A teacher’s first priority is to educate their students, but educating and communicating openly with parents through Blogs is a helpful tool to keep the lines of communication open between teachers and students families.

Salient Features of EDUBLOG:

Students can use EduBlog to record what they learn, and teachers can use Blogs record what they teach. For example, a teacher can Blog a course specifying the assignments that the students are required to do, including the assessment method, along with links to internet resources, and recording daily what is taught. This application has many advantages;

• Students can quickly catch up if they miss a class.
• The teacher could be used the Blogs as a course plan.
• The EduBlog serves as an accurate summary of the course that prospective students or new teachers can refer to. Blogging could also be used to record class excursions and to create electronic “scrapbooks” of student life.
• EduBlog could be used to motivate the students to do more reading and encourage them to develop their values.
• Blogs could also be used to bring out the diversity in the classrooms, in terms of learning styles and individual preferences.
• Can encourage Critical thinking, Analogical and Analytical thinking.
• Can encourage Creative, Intuitive and Associational thinking.
• Potential for maximized access and exposure to the quality information
• Can ensure social interactions.
• Link one’s class with another class somewhere else in the world.

Role of Teacher in EDUBLOG:

Teacher plays an important role in the development and utilization of Blog in learning. The teacher should act as a role model by creating his/ her own Blog. Moreover, the teacher has to motivate the learner to utilize these technological innovations in teaching learning situations.

Teachers can create a EduBlog to

• Reflect on their teaching experiences.
• Reveal teacher-training experiences.
• Write about the specific teaching unit.
• Explain what work you did in the classroom.
• Provide some hints for teaching other teachers.
• Write about something new you have learned from other teachers.
• Explain teaching insights which you acquired from what happens in your class room.
• Share ideas for teaching learning activities or language games to use in the classroom.
• Describe usage technology in the class room.
• Write about important teaching and learning issues.
• Post the information related to the class room such as calendars, events, homework, assignments and other related class information.
• Post assignments based on subjects matter and have students respond on their own weblogs.
• Describe the tips for improving writing skills.
• Provide the examples for class work, vocabulary activities and grammar games.
• Provide exposure to online readings for the students to read and react.
• Collect and organize the Internet resources for a particular course, providing links to appropriate sites and annotating the links as to what is relevant about them.
• Post photos and comments on class room activities.
• Invite the comments posted by students or postings on issues in order to give them a writing voice.
• Publish about good student writings done in class the classroom.
• Show the students’ art, poetry, and creative stories.
• Create an effective teaching site, posting not only classroom information, but also activities, discussion topics, links to additional information about topics they are studying in class, and readings to inspire learning.
• Create a literature club and an online book club.
• Publish the students’ messages on specific topics being used to develop language skills.

A teacher has to motivate the students to create their own EduBlog to; 

• Write their reactions to the thought-provoking questions.
• Write their reactions to photos that are seen.
• Discuss results of surveys they carry out as part of a class unit.
• Express their ideas and opinions about topics discussed in the class room.
• Complete class writing assignments given by the teacher.
• Write about comments, opinions, or questions on daily news items or issues of interest.
• Discuss the activities which they have done in the class and tell what they think about them.
• Write about the class topics, using newly acquired vocabulary words and idioms.
• Display their best writing pieces. The teacher can also encourage the students to create a shared weblog to;
• Complete the group project work, assigning each group a different task.
• Describe the products of project-based learning.

Complete the student Web Quest. (Anne Davis’s EduBlog Insights, 2004).

This Article Collect From:

• Vimalkumar, P. (2010). Effectiveness of blog based learning in Physics at Higher secondary level.

The post EDUBLOG appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Juran Sarkhel (2017).

(Professor of Library & Information Science, University of Kalyani, India)

1.1 Introduction:

Indexing language (IL) is an artificial language made up of expressions connecting several kernel terms and adopted to the requirements of indexing. The function of an IL is to do whatever a natural language (NL) does and in addition organize the semantic content through a different expression providing a point of access to the seekers of information. An IL is a system for naming subjects and has controlled vocabulary. The vocabulary of an IL may be verbal or coded. A classification scheme uses coded vocabulary in the form of notation and authority lists uses verbal vocabulary. It is a prerequisite to understanding the features of the language used for the representation of the subject content of the documents in terms of their linguistics structures and functions for the purpose of studying the structure of indexing language. Thus, there are areas of linguistics which are of common interest to information scientists.

1.2 Meaning and Scope of Indexing Language:

A language is a code through which messages are transmitted. It is a communication medium based on the association of thoughts/ideas. In terms of linguistics, all spoken languages (i.e. natural language) consist of three basic elements: vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Vocabulary is a list of terms/words used in a particular natural language. Syntax comprises a grammatical structure or a set of rules that govern the sequence of occurrence of terms/words in a sentence. Semantics refers to the study of what meaning is and how it operates. It is, in other words, a systematic study of how meaning is structured, expressed and understood in the use of a language. The syntax is used to resolve word meaning through the determination of context.

Information systems are concerned with the communication of information about the documents to the potential users of those documents. The means of communication are the subject indexing language or simply an indexing language. An IL is a system for naming subjects of the records of information (i.e. document). It is an artificial language made up of expressions connecting several kernel terms/notations. The function of an IL is to do whatever an NL does and in addition organize the semantic content through a different expression providing a point of access to the seekers of information. Thesauri, the readymade lists of subject headings and classification schemes are the examples of subject indexing languages.

1.3 Natural Language (NL) versus Indexing Language:

If the terms that appear in the documents are used without required modifications, it is a NL. Since the usage of a NL leads to many problems, such as those arising from the use of different words by different authors to denote the same idea, an alternate to NL is, to use artificial language adapted to the specific needs. The artificial language uses concept indexing rather than term indexing. The terms are representatives of a NL used by authors. The concepts imbibe standard description established in IL. The NL is flexible and advantageous to authors to use different terms to denote the same concept. The indexer, who is more concerned with the ideas conveyed rather than the language niceties, depends upon artificial language. The differences between the natural language and indexing language are furnished below:

1.4 Structure of Indexing Language:

Like natural language, an indexing language consists of three elements: (a) Vocabulary (not free vocabulary, but controlled vocabulary), (b) Syntax, and (c) Semantics. All the structured indexing languages are based upon careful subject analysis. The following figure presents the structure of an indexing language:

1.4.1 Controlled Vocabulary: An indexing language operates with a controlled vocabulary. An IL having controlled vocabulary attempting to indicate the relationship between terms in the index vocabulary is systematically structured. The vocabulary of an IL is either verbal or coded. Subject heading lists and thesauri come within the purview ofverbal controlled vocabulary. A classification scheme employs coded vocabulary in the form of its notation. Thus, for example in Colon Classification (CC) Schedule ‘Indian History’ is rendered as V44. In Sear’s List of Subject Headings which employs verbal vocabulary, it is rendered as: India – History. There are also controlled vocabularies like Thesaurofacet, Classaurus, etc., which possess both the characteristics verbal as well as coded controlled vocabularies. In any case, the selection of terms to be used in each discipline is primary and coding is done at a later stage. The need, objectives, methods of vocabulary control, etc. are discussed in detail in another post.

1.4.2 Syntax: The etymological meaning of syntax is ‘putting things together in an orderly manner’. In the context of an indexing language, syntax refers to a set of rules or grammar which governs the sequence of words in a subject heading, or notations in a classification number.

Most of the subjects treated even in modern macro documents are of compound nature. This means that the name of a subject can no longer be represented by a single word or term. When a number of terms have to be used in representing the subject coextensively, the syntax is necessary to put the terms in a most helpful and known searchable order. In other words, we can say that syntax of an indexing language provides a pattern of the relationship which we recognize between the terms used in the system, i.e. between the terms in the index vocabulary or controlled vocabulary. This recognition is based on a careful subject analysis which is basic to the indexing language.

The order of terms according to the rules of syntax of an indexing language assumes greater importance of presenting the correct meaning of a subject heading. Apart from the order of terms prescribed by its rules of syntax, it becomes necessary, at times, to use relational symbols or indicator digits to bring out the correct relations between terms. In this connection, it is to be pointed out here that natural language provides auxiliaries like prepositions, conjunctions, etc. to bring out the correct meaning of the sentence. But in an indexing language, such auxiliaries are not available and hence, the correct meaning of a subject heading has to be expressed largely through the order of terms along with the relational symbols like role operators or indicator digits. The syntactical relationship is documented dependent relationship.

1.4.3 Semantics: As stated earlier, semantics refers to the systematic study of how meaning is structured, expressed and understood in the use of an indexing language. Various types of semantic relationships are evident in an indexing language. These relationships include equivalence relationships, hierarchical relationships, and associative relationships. Meaning of the term can be derived from its hierarchy. The semantic relationship is documented independent relationship. The syntactical rules of an indexing language are also used to resolve the meaning of the term in a subject heading (consisting of a string of terms) through the determination of context.

1.5 Attributes of an Indexing Language:

Indexing language is designed for a special purpose. It serves three purposes-representing subject content of documents, organizing a searchable file, and representing subject content of the queries of the users while searching the index file. A positive result in searching is achieved only when the content representation of the document by the indexer and that of the queries by the searcher match. This matching of the file is very much dependent on the organization of the index file in a predetermined order and the awareness of the users of it. Various attributes of an indexing language like vocabulary control, concept coordination, multiple access, syndetic devices, relation manifestation, and structural presentation play very important roles in the successful organization of the index file and subsequent matching of the index and queries of the users.

1.5.1 Vocabulary Control: The vocabulary of an indexing language is controlled for standardization ofterms-i.e. one concept should be denoted by only one term. This is done by controlling synonyms, near-synonyms and word forms, and by distinguishing among homographs.

1.5.2 Concept Coordination: The contents of most of the documents of present days cannot be represented by only one term. Because of the use of multiple terms and multiple relationships among terms to represent the content of the document it has become imperative to make available standard guidelines for the coordination of concepts dented by the terms. One of the essential components of an indexing language, i.e. syntax governs the sequence of words in a subject proposition. The natural language provides auxiliaries like prepositions, conjunctions, etc. among the substantive words to bring out the correct meaning of the sentence. But such auxiliaries are not available in an indexing language. The correct meaning of a subject is expressed mainly through the order of terms according to the rules of syntax, sometimes along with the relational symbols like role operators or indicator digits of an indexing language. These rules of syntax will vary from one indexing language to another. Coordination of concepts is carried out by the indexer at the time of indexing (i.e. at input stage) in pre-coordinate indexing and by the searcher at the time searching (i.e. at output stage) in post-coordinate indexing.

1.5.3 Multiple Access: The syntactical rules of the given indexing language help us to determine the order of significance in a linear representation of the subject of a document. It provides only single access in the searchable index file. Rigidity ofthe significance order may not meet the approaches ofall the users ofthe index file. In order to satisfy the approaches of all the users, indexing languages have introduced the mechanism for multiple index entries by rotating or cycling ofthe component terms representing the subject ofthe document. The rotation is carried out in such a way that each of the component terms gets access position as a lead term in the index entries. Each lead term is followed by other component terms in order to maintain the context and correct meaning ofthe subject proposition. The provision of a mechanism for multiple index entries by rotating or cycling of the component terms is a special feature of indexing language. However, it has been observed that even the acceptance of this multiple access mechanism covers only a fraction ofthe possible number ofthe total permutations, which in turn, results into the failure ofthe index file to provide a particular pattern of combinations which the user is looking for. Consequently, a large portion of probable approach points is left uncovered.

1.5.4 Syndetic Device: Syndetic device is an organizational framework in which related subjects are linked together in an underlying classificatory structure.

• Cross References: Related and equivalent subjects are linked to each other by a network of references via connecting terms such as See also and See / USE / OF respectively.

• Inversion of Headings: The strict adherence to the natural language order of terms in a subject heading would often lead to headings in which the first word is not the most significant. In such a situation natural language order of terms is inverted in a subject heading.

1.5.5 Relation Manifestations: The range of an indexing language is not simply a matter ofvocabulary. Provision for rules of syntax is to be made for the expression of relationships between the terms comprising the vocabulary. These relationships, as conceived by a team lead by J. C. Gardin during the SYNTOL (Syntagmatic Organization Language) programme for the development of a meta-language as a common ground between different information retrieval systems in the 1960s, are of two kinds: Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic relations.

• Paradigmatic relationship: Paradigmatic relations also called semantic or generic relations, usually find expression in the organization of the vocabulary itself. Thus in classification schedules, it is through the successive degrees of subordination that such relations are made explicit. In the readymade lists of subject headings or thesauri, the relationships are expressed through the manifestation of hierarchical relationships through the relationship indicators BT and NT. A paradigmatic relationship is documented independent relationships because this relationship is established without any reference to a document.

• Syntagmatic relationship: In addition to the expression of paradigmatic relationships, rules and facilities are provided for the coordination of terms from the vocabulary in order to express more complex meanings. Syntagmatic relationships, also called syntactical relationships are achieved by means of syntactical rules of the given indexing language. Two major syntactic devices very much common in indexing languages are the use of a word or teen order and relators or linking mechanisms. Kaiser’s Thing-Process, Ranganathan’s PMEST, Coates’s Thing-Material-Action and Relationship Table are some of the examples of formulae for determining term order and thus standardizing and controlling syntax. A major principle underlying term order is significance. Component order of a compound subject heading can be expressed in more than one way. The question of order can be answered by reference to significance-that is, by an analysis of the relative importance to the searcher of the concepts concerned. The result of such analysis is to bring into prominence key concepts. Syntagmatic relationships are document dependent relationships because these relationships are established with reference to the concepts associated with the content of a given document. As for example, a document entitled “Social aspects of literacy among rural women in India” will call for the combination of concepts from Sociology, Education and Geography. They represent the syntagmatic relation in the context of this specific document and an indexing language must have the mechanism to represent these concepts in a subject heading.

1.5.6 Structural Presentation: The basic objective of an indexing language is to provide a subject approach to the contents of documents to the users. It is generally agreed that a user-oriented approach may not be confined to the specific subject only. A user who starts a search for looking a specific subject ‘Conservation of tiger’ may avoid to notice a document on `Conservation of wildlife’ which may contain equally valuable information on `Conservation of tiger’ because he believes that the more specific subject `conservation of tiger’ will not be covered in the document ‘Conservation of wildlife’. Similarly, ‘Conservation of the tiger’ may contain equally valuable information on the `Conservation of wildlife’. Thus it appears that the broader, as well as narrower subjects, may help the user even with a specific search. This situation calls for structuring the indexing language in such a systematic manner that the semantic network of concepts and the relationship between concepts are displayed in it. All the indexing languages display such relationships in one way or other and thus all of them are structured. A classification scheme displays such relationship by notation whereas a verbal indexing language like a readymade list of subject headings and thesaurus display such relationship by the relationship indicators BT and NT.

1.6 Types of Indexing Languages:

1.6.1 Classification Schemes: It has already been mentioned in sub-section 1.4. 1 of this Unit that controlled vocabulary of an IL is of two types: verbal and coded vocabularies. A classification scheme employs coded vocabulary in the form of its notation. Libraries have long been using notational schemes of library classification to organize information resources on the shelves, and to provide means for locating information resources in the bibliographical tools-such as catalogues, bibliographies, abstracting and indexing documents. We know that classification is a mental process of a grouping of entities in order of their degree of likeness and separating entities according to their degree of unlikeness. All class designations of subjects are the names of subjects irrespective of the fact that whether they are in terms of class numbers or verbal specifications. The assignment of class designation in the notational plane is called class number, and the preparation of tools to be used for this purpose is classification schemes. Modern classification schemes such as Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), Library of Congress (LC) Classification, Colon Classification (CC), etc. were devised several decades ago or more. Although over the years they have been modified and improved, their main objectives remain unchanged. The Web version of DDC, 22nd edition, i.e. WebDewey includes all updates since its publication in 2003 plus supplemental data. The most important feature of WebDewey is that it gives additional points of access by combining DDC numbers and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). It also gives access to many pre-built numbers, especially in the Literature class which are not available in the print version Although classification schemes were mainly designed for organizing bibliographic items, many researchers have also used classification schemes to organize information resources on the Web.

1.6.2 Subject Heading Lists: Subject heading has been defined as a word or group of words (phrase) indicating a subject under which all materials dealing with the same theme is entered in a catalogue or bibliography, or is arranged in a file. A vocabulary control device depends on a master list of words/terms that can be assigned to documents. Such a master list of terms is referred to as a list of subject headings. A subject heading list is alphabetical list terms and phrases, with appropriate cross-references and notes, that can be used as a source of subject headings in order to represent the subject content of a document. A list of other semantically related terms or phrases is displayed under each term or phrase. A printed list of subject headings incorporates the thought and experience of many librarians of various types of libraries.

General Principles

The rules for subject headings in a dictionary catalogue were formulated by Charles Ammi Cutter in 1876 in his ‘Rules fora Dictionary Catalog’. The impact of Cutter’s principles on construction and maintenance of subject headings is still discernible today. Both, the LCSH and the SLSH adopted the Cutter’s principles in assigning subject headings for a document. The general principles that guide the indexers in the choice and rendering of subject headings from the standard lists of subject headings are discussed in the ‘following sub-sections.

• Specificity: The principles of specific and direct entry requires that a document be assigned directly under the most specific subject heading that accurately and precisely represents its subject content. If a document is about penguins, it should be entered directly under the most specific heading ‘Penguins’, not under the heading ‘Birds’ or even under ‘Water Birds’ which includes Penguins’. If the name of a specific subject is not available, a broader heading is the most specific authorized heading in the hierarchy that covers the content of the work. In many cases, several headings may be assigned in order to cover different aspects of a subject.

• Common Usage: This principle states that the word(s) used to express a subject must represent common usage. There may be problems in the selection of subject headings when the same concept is expressed by two or more terms. According to this principle, subject headings are to be chosen to keep in mind the needs of the users who are likely to use the index file. If a choice between spellings is made for dialectal reasons (for example, between American and British English), the most widely accepted spelling ofwords, based on users warrant, should be adopted. If a popular and a scientific name refer to the same concept, the form most likely to be sought by the users shouldbe chosen. After deciding on the name ofheading, a cross-reference should be made from the non-preferred to the preferred form.

• Uniformity: The principle ofuniform heading is adopted in order to bring consistency in the use of subject headings. A subject heading list has to be very precise and exact in order to ensure that each concept is represented by a single preferred term. Both synonyms and homographs are to be controlled. It should list the other synonyms and variants as non-preferred terms with USE references to the preferred term. One uniform term must be selected from several synonyms and other variants, and this term must be applied consistently to all documents on the topic. If several meanings are attached to one term (e.g, Crane as a bird / Crane as lifting equipment) that term must be qualified so that it will be clear to the users for which the meaning is intended.

• Consistent and Current Terminology: The principle states that the term(s) chosen as subject headings should be both consistent and current as has already been said regarding the justifications for uniform headings. By principle, common usage prevails when there is a problem of choices among synonymous terms and other variants. Changes in usage also present many practical difficulties. A term chosen on the basis of common usage may become obsolete with the passage of time. Subsequently, a list of subject headings may incorporate current terminology as long as entries pose a problem because of the large number of entries listed under the existing subject headings. In such a situation a subject authority file is to be maintained. Once a heading is changed, every record that was linked to the old heading can be linked to the new heading and this decision is recorded in the subject authority file.

• Form Heading: Form headings refer to those words or phrases which represent the literary or artistic form (e.g., Essays, Poetry, Fiction, etc.). These are the words or phrases that follow a subject heading and indicated by a dash. These words or phrases are used to make the subject more specific. Assignment of form headings to individual works as well as to collections and materials about the form enables the libraries to provide access to these kinds of materials to the users. Apart from literary works themselves, there are also many kinds of library materials about literary forms that require subject headings. For a document on how to write an essay, the heading “Essay” represents a subject. A topical subject heading and a form headings can be distinguished by using the singular form for the topical subject heading and plural for the form heading (e.g., Short story, Short stories). In addition to the literary form headings, there are some other form headings that are determined by the general format and purpose of the documents, such as Almanacs, Encyclopaedias, Dictionaries, and Gazetteers.

• Cross Reference: Cross-references direct the user from term/phrase not used as headings to the term/ phrase that is used, and from broader and related topics to the one chosen to represent a given subject. Three types of cross-references are used in the subject headings structure. These are discussed below:

• See (or USE) references: These references guide users from terms that are not used as headings to the authorized headings for the subject in question. ‘See’ or ‘USE’ references ensure that inspite of different names for (or different forms of the name of) a given subject a user shall still be able to locate materials on it.

• See also (including BT, NT, and RT) references: These references guide users to the headings that are related either hierarchically or associatively and are used as entries in the index file. By connecting related headings, the ‘see also’ (RT, for the related term) references draw the user’s attention to material related to his interest. By linking hierarchically related headings, ‘see also’ (BT, for broader term; NT, for narrower term) references directs the users to search specific deviations or aspects of his subject of interest.

• General references: General references direct the users to a group or category of headings instead of individual headings. It is sometimes called a ‘blanket reference’. The provision of general references in the standard list of subject headings obviates the need to make long lists of specific references and thus ensure economy of space.

Subject Authority File:

A subject authority file consisting of subject authority records ensures uniformity and consistency in subject heading terminology and cross-references. The process of creating subject authority records and maintaining subject authority file is called subject authority control. Subject authority control is exercised at two levels: central and local. At the central level, a central agency (e.g. Library ofCongress) maintains the subject authority file (in card or machine-readable form) or subject heading list (in print form) and makes changes to existing headings and cross-references as well as adding new ones. At the local level, a library creates local subject authority records only for headings not yet appeared as established headings in a subject heading list along with needed maintenance information. Thus, the subject authority control at the local level includes correcting erroneous headings and cross-references, updating obsolete headings, and adding or revising cross-references necessitated by new headings. ALA Glossary has defined the subject authority file as “A set of records indicating the authorized forms of terms used as subject headings in a particular set of bibliographic records; the references made to and from the authorized forms; and the information used, and its sources, in the establishment of the headings and the determination of the references to be made”. (ALAGlossary of library and Information Science. Chicago: American Library Association, 1983, p.220). This definition suggests that a subject authority record should contain the following items of information: (a) established subject heading; (b) scope notes, if any, (c) cross-references made from it to other headings; and (d) sources or authorities on which the decision on the form of heading was based. A subject authority record is made when subject headings are established and used for the first time.

The functions of a subject authority file are discussed below:

• Indexing: The subject authority file serves as the source of indexing vocabulary and as the means of verifying or validating headings assigned to individual indexing records. It helps to ensure that: a) the same heading is assigned to all works on the same subject, b) each heading represents only that particular subject, and c) all headings assigned to indexing records conform to the established forms.

• Maintenance: Necessary adjustments to indexing records are needed to be added from time to time as a result of changes in the indexing vocabulary. When existing subject headings are revised or new headings are added; cross-references are often affected and should be adjusted. The subject authority file reflects the most current status ofheadings and cross-references and thus, serves as the source for verification and validation of subject headings as to the indexing records. It is also useful when a library converts its manual form to the online mode and wishes to have previously existing records reflect current practice.

• Retrieval: Subject authority file helps the users in two ways: (1) subject headings displayed in the subject authority file show the user the terminology and form of subject access points in the index file; and (2) the cross-references guide the users to related headings when user’s input terms fail to retrieve useful records.

1.6.3 Thesaurus:

The term thesaurus has been derived from Greek and Latin words which mean ‘a treasury’ and it has been used for several centuries to mean a lexicon or treasury of words. Modern usage may be said to date from 1852, when the first edition of Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was published by Peter Mark Roget. A thesaurus (plural: thesauri) with which we are concerned is meant for information retrieval and is used as a valuable vocabulary control device for indexing and searching in a specific subject area. The journey of the thesaurus from the linguistic domain to information retrieval is evident from the following timeline:

1736: The term ‘thesaurus’ first appeared in OED. It came from the Greek word `thesaurus’ which means ‘Treasury or storehouse of knowledge’.

1852: Appeared Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus. It was a linguistic thesaurus showing the word(s) by which the given idea most fitly and aptly expressed, i.e. Classification of ideas.

1957: Dorking Conference. Miss Helen Brownson first brought the idea of `thesaurus’ in terms if IR through a paper presented there.

1959: H P Luhn gave the idea of the application of thesaurus in IR.

1969: The first thesaurus used in IR system was developed by Do Pont in USA.

Definition:

There are many different definitions of thesauri, varying from quite modest definitions that focus on the relations between words without stating which kinds of relations that are meant, to such definitions that state more exactly which relations that are concerned. The definition of Thesaurus provided by World Science Information System of UNESCO (known as UNISIST) on the basis of its function and structure seems to be most comprehensive to understand the meaning and scope of the thesaurus:

“In terms of function, a thesaurus is a terminological control device used in translating from the natural language of documents, indexers or users into a more constrained `system language’ (documentation language, information language)”. “In terms of structure, a thesaurus is a controlled and dynamic vocabulary of semantically and generically related terms which covers a specific domain of knowledge”.

Purpose:

A thesaurus is a semantic network of terms. Its purposes are

a) To provide a map of a given field of knowledge, how concepts or ideas about concepts are related to one another, which helps an indexer or a searcher to understand the structure of the field.

b) To provide a standard vocabulary for a given subject field which will ensure that indexers are consistent when they are making index entries to information storage and retrieval system.

c) To provide a system of references between terms which will ensure that only one term from a set of synonyms is used for indexing one concept, and that indexers and searchers are told which of the set is the one chosen; and to provide guide to terms which are related to any index term in other ways, either by classification structure or otherwise in the literature.

d) To provide a guide for users of the system so that they choose the correct term for a subject search; this stresses the importance of cross-references. If an indexer uses more than one synonym in the same index—for example, “abroad”, “foreign” and “overseas”—then documents are liable to be indexed haphazardly under all of these; a searcher who chooses one and finds documents indexed there will assume that he has found the correct term and will stop his search without knowing that there are other useful documents indexed under the other synonyms.

e) To locate a new concept in a scheme of relationships with existing concepts in a way which makes sense to users of the system.

f) To provide classified hierarchies so that a search can be broadened and narrowed systematically if the first choice of search term produces either too few or too many references to the materials in the store.

g) A desirable purpose, but one which it would be premature to say is being achieved, is to provide a means by which the use of terms in a given subject field may be standardized.

Basic Thesaural Relationships:

Basic thesaural relationships or the semantic relationships in a thesaurus refer to two types of relationships: (1) Hierarchical Relationship; (2) and Non-Hierarchical Relationship. The following figure shows the different types ofrelationships displayed in a thesaurus.

1. Hierarchical Relationship Hierarchical relationships are based on degrees or levels of superordination and subordination, where the superordinate term represents a class or a whole, and subordinate terms refer to its members or parts. This relationship is of four types: Genus-Species (Generic) relationship, Whole-Part relationship, Instance relationship, and Poly-hierarchical relationship.

Reciprocity in the hierarchical relationships is expressed by the relationship indicators: BT (Broader Term), ie. a label for the superordinate (parent) term; and NT (Narrower Term), i.e. a label for the subordinate (child) term.

• Genus-Species (Generic) Relationship links genus and species and represents the basis of the scientific taxonomic system. As for example

Examples of Hierarchical relationship indicator (BT and NT),

• Whole-Part Relationship covers situations in which one concept is inherently included in another, regardless of context, so that the terms can be organized into logical hierarchies, with the whole treated as a broader term. As for example:

• Instance Relationship identifies the link between a general category of things or events, expressed by a common noun, and an individual instance of that category, often a proper name. As for examples:

• Polyhierarchical Relationship occurs when some concepts belong, on logical grounds, to more than one category. In the following example, the term pianos are assigned to subordinate positions on the basis of its generic relationship to two broader terms-in other words, pianos would be an NT to both stringed instruments and wind instruments.

2. Non-Hierarchical Relationship: Relationship between terms other than hierarchical is called Non-hierarchical relationship, which may further be grouped as Equivalence (or Preferential) Relationship and Associative Relationship.

a. Equivalence (or Preferential) Relationship refers to the relationship between preferred and non-preferred terms in which each term is regarded as referring to the same concept. When the same concept can be expressed by two or more terms, one of these is selected as the preferred term. A cross-reference to the preferred term should be made from any “equivalent” entry term. Reciprocity in the equivalence relationships is expressed by the relationship indicators: USE, which leads from a non-preferred (entry) term to the preferred term, and UF or USED FOR, which leads from the preferred entry term to the non-preferred term(s).

Four basic types of equivalence relationship are evident: (a) Synonyms; (b) Lexical variants; (c) near-synonyms; and (d) Generic posting.

• Synonyms: Synonymy occurs when a concept can be represented by multiple terms having the same or similar meanings. A thesaurus compensates for the problems caused by synonymy by ensuring that each concept is represented by a single preferred term. It lists other synonyms and variants as non-preferred terms with USE references to the preferred term.

• Lexical variants: Lexical variants differ from synonyms in that synonyms are different terms for the same concept, while lexical variants are different word forms for the same expression. These forms may derive from spelling or grammatical variation or from abbreviated formats. The following examples indicate the preferred grammatical forms of terms.

b. Nouns and Noun Phrases: The grammatical form of a term should be a noun or noun phrase. Nouns used as a team are divided into two categories: Count nouns and Noncount (mass) nouns. Count Nouns are names of objects or concepts that are subject to the question “How many?” but not “How much?” These should normally be expressed as plurals. For examples: books, penguins, singers, vertebrates, windows, etc. Mass (noncount) nouns are names of materials or substances that are subject to the question “How much?” but not “How many?” These should be expressed in the singular. Some examples of Singular mass nouns are: milk, water, etc.

Where the singular and plural forms of a term represent different concepts, separate terms for each are entered in the thesaurus. The distinction should be indicated by a qualifier. Some examples are: Bridge (game) / Bridges (structures); Damage (injury) / Damages (law); Wood (material) / Woods (forested areas). Noun phrases are compound terms that are established as preferred terms if they represent a single concept.

Noun phrases occur in two forms: (a) Adjectival noun phrases like Red rose, Marine birds, Cold fusion, Historical drama, etc.; and (b) Prepositional noun phrases like Plaster of Paris, Prisoners of war, Hospitals for children, etc.

c. Adjectives: Adjectives and adjectival phrases used alone are established as terms in a thesaurus under certain special circumstances. Single adjectives are used in a “nominal” way; that is, the noun is obvious from the context or the adjective is used to describe an attribute of the content object other than topics, such as colour or size. For examples: small, medium, large, blue, green, red, yellow, etc.

As an alternative to the creation of multiple compound terms, adjectives may appear as separate terms when designed to be pre-coordinated in indexing or post coordinated in searching. They should generally not be assigned as indexing terms in isolation. Given the possibility of false coordination in searching (e.g., the linking of an adjective with the wrong noun), adjectival terms should be used sparingly. Some examples of the use of adjectives as terms in pre- and post coordination are: Airborne / Airborne troops; Offshore / Offshore drilling; Mobile / Mobile homes, etc.

Certain noun phrases may be used to modify other nouns, e.g., high frequency can modify the noun waves.

Adjectives may be used alone in general cross-references to direct the user to or from a group of terms beginning with a corresponding noun, e.g., “cardiac . . . see also the terms beginning with heart.”An example of a reference in the opposite direction (noun to adjective) is: “France see also the terms beginning with French (French art, French language, French literature, French wines).”

d. Adverbs: Adverbs such as “very” or “highly” should not be used alone as terms. A phrase beginning with such an adverb may be accepted as a term only when it has acquired a specialized meaning within a domain. Some examples of adverbial phrases are: very high frequency, very large scale integration, very low-density lipoproteins, etc.

e. Abbreviations: Abbreviations are selected as preferred terms only when they have become so well established that the full form of the term or proper name is rarely used, e.g. AIDS rather than Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; Lasers rather than Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; UNESCO rather than United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; etc. The full form of terms are selected as preferred terms when the abbreviated form is not widely used and generally understood, e.g. Automated teller machine rather than ATM; Prisoners of war rather than POW; etc. Cross-references should be made from the non-preferred forms to the preferred form.

e. Popular and Scientific Names: If a popular and a scientific name refer to the same concept, the form most likely to be sought by the users of the thesaurus should be chosen as the preferred term. For example, Penguins is chosen as the preferred term in a nontechnical thesaurus with a cross-reference from the scientific equivalent, Sphenisciformes. However, Sphenisciformes is selected as the preferred term in a zoological thesaurus with a cross-reference from the popular name, Penguins.

• Near-synonyms: Near-synonyms are terms whose meanings are generally regarded as different, but which are treated as equivalents for the purposes of a controlled vocabulary. The extent to which terms are treated as near-synonyms depends in large measure upon the domain covered by the controlled vocabulary and its size. Near-synonyms may include antonyms or represent points on a continuum. As for examples, Seawater/saltwater [variant terms]; Smoothness/ roughness [antonyms].

• Generic Posting: It is a technique in which the name of a class and the names of its members are treated as equivalents, with the broader class name functioning as the preferred term. As for examples, Waxes OF Plant waxes; Plant waxes USE Waxes.

3. Associative Relationships: This relationship covers associations between terms that are neither equivalent nor hierarchical, yet the terms are semantically or conceptually associated to such an extent that the link between them is made explicit in the thesaurus, on the grounds that it may suggest additional terms for use in indexing or retrieval. The associative relationship used in thesauri is indicated by the abbreviation RT (Related Term). As a general guideline, whenever one term is used, the other should always be implied within the common frames of reference shared by the users of the thesaurus. Either of the following types of terms can be linked by the associative relationship:

a) Those belonging to the same category, and

b) Those belonging to different categories.

• Relationships between terms belonging to the same category: Relationships are needed for terms belonging to the same category in various special situations, primarily to guide the user in locating the desired term. Each of the terms belonging to the same category has its own particular meaning, but the boundary between them is often confused with common usage, to the extent that a user checking one of them in the index should be informed of documents indicated by others. As for examples:

• Relationships between terms belonging to the different categories: It is possible to establish many grounds for associating terms belonging to different categories. Related Term references are often made between etymologically related terms, i.e., terms that contain the same root, but which do not represent the same kind of thing. The following are some representative examples of typical relational situations.

a) Process / Agent

Temperature control

RT Thermostats

Thermostats

RT Temperature control

b) Process / Counteragent

Inflammation

RT Anti-inflammatory agents

Anti-inflammatory agents RT

Inflammation

c) Action / Property

Polling

RT Public opinion

Public opinion

RT Polling

d) Action / Product:

Weaving

RT Cloth

Cloth

RT Weaving

e) Action / Target:

Harvesting

RT Crops

Crops

RT Harvesting

f) Cause / Effect:

Cloud

RT Rain

Rain RT Cloud

g) Concept or Object / Property:

Poisons

RT Toxicity

Toxicity

RT Poisons

h) Concept or Object / Origins:

Americans

RT United States

United States

RT Americans

i) Concept or Object / Units or Mechanisms of Measurement Associative Relationships:

Electric current

RT Amperes

Amperes

RT Electric current

j) Raw Material / Product:

Wheat

RT Flour

Flour

RT Wheat

k) Discipline or Field of Study / Object or Phenomenon Study

Neurology

RT Nervous system

Nervous system

RT Neurology

I) Discipline or Field of Study / Practitioner

Mathematics

RT Mathematicians

Mathematicians

RT Mathematics

m) Antonyms:

Height

RT Depth

Depth

RT Height

n) Phrases Containing Syncategorematic Nouns and their Apparent Foci:

Ships

RT Model ships

Model ships

RT Ships

o) Coordinate Ideas:

Hinduism

RT Buddhism

Christianity

Islam

1.6.4 Thesaurofacet:

Thesaurofacet: a thesaurus and faceted classification for engineering and related topics were developed from the English Electric Company’s Faceted classification for Engineering, the first edition of which was published in 1958. Thesaurofacet came about when the third edition ofFaceted Classification for Engineering, published in 1961, was up for revision. This system was used to organize documents belonging to the libraries of the corporation of English Electric. However, with the growing trends in science and technology and the need for using computer techniques and post-coordinate indexing, a decision was taken in 1967 to commission Jean Aitchison, a member of Classification Research Group, to review the indexing needs of the company and the result of that review was the compilation of a new and improved 4th edition of the faceted classification system called Thesaurofacet, published in 1970. In the 4th edition, the alphabetized index to the classification scheme was replaced with a thesaurus.

Thesaurofacet covers the whole field of science and technology but subjects are treated in varying depth and only engineering and allied fields are covered exhaustively. Full subject coverage includes engineering and fields directly related to engineering like computers, measurement and testing, physics and management. Relevant management-related concepts were borrowed from the “Classification of Business Studies” developed by the London Graduate School of Business Studies.

Thesaurofacet is considered as a multi-purpose retrieval language tool because it has classification schedules and a faceted thesaurus. The classification consists of main classes and facets and has a notation system that consists of letters in upper case and numbers from 2 to 9. The faceted thesaurus is the key to the uniqueness of the tool because it offers the user options to identify topics within the system. Because the two are linked, each term in the system appears twice, once in the schedule, and once in the thesaurus, with a notation that links the two parts together. However, the information given about the term in the thesaurus is not the same information given about that term in the schedule. The two parts of the system are complementary and should be used conjunctively and not separately. Finally, Thesaurofacet can be used for the arrangement of books on the shelves and arrangement of entries in the subject catalogues. Further, the index terms are intended to be used for indexing and searching.

If we are asked for information on Documentation, we turn to the thesaurus and find:

Documentation use

Information Science

At Information Science we find

Information Science                ZR

UF             Documentation

                  Librarianship

Library science

RT              Communication (Sociology)

                   Data processing

                   Information theory

                   Librarians

We also see the notation to the right and we are told to look for ZR in the classification schedules. At ZR in the classification schedule we find that Thesaurofacet divides Information Science using subjects and facets:

Main Class

Subject Field(s)

Fundamental Facets

Sub-Facets

Hierarchies and Arrays

ZR           Information science

ZR2         LIBRARIES

        By type:

ZR3         National libraries

ZR4          Public libraries

ZR5           Municipal libraries

ZR6           County libraries

ZRB           Educational Libraries

        By management:

ZRP           Library management

Here Information Science is called Main Class. Main class can be divided into subject fields, in this case LIBRARIES, and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL. Subject fields are broken down into fundamental facets, and are printed by bold typeface (e.g. by type, by management, by equipment, etc.). This is where the schedules start to use facet analysis. If we take a look at one of the fundamental facets as an example, Information Retrieval is broken down ‘By type of language’ into the facet Index languages. The facet is broken down into sub-facet Natural Language and Controlled index languages. Terms are then listed in hierarchies and arrays. The schedules are typically used for a broad subject search and browsing through the possible topics that exist within a class. So a user may start with the main class and navigate through the facets and arrays to locate an ideal or more specific topic.

The classification schedules also allow for the combination or synthesis of topics and notation. For example, there is a note in the main class ZL SOCIOLOGY that tells us that this topic can be combined with ZM PSYCHOLOGY to create the synthesized subject field called ZL/ZM SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. Synthesis can indeed be used wherever required, there being no preferred combination order unless there is an instruction in the schedules.

Thus it appears that two types or styles of”faceted classifications integrated with thesauri”: the First type uses subject fields as main subdivisions, and facet analysis is used to determine the relationships and the second type of faceted thesauri are those in which concepts are first divided by facets.

1.6.5 Classaurus:

The vocabulary control device used for POPSI has been designated as Classaurus. It is a category-based (faceted) systematic scheme of hierarchical classification in verbal plane incorporating all the essential features of a conventional IR thesaurus—i.e. control of synonyms, quasi-synonyms, etc. RTs are not shown in the classaurus. A scheme of this type, for its application, calls for a complementary alphabetical index giving the address of each term occurring in the systematic part. The purpose for which a classaurus is used does not necessarily warrant any principle-based arrangement of the terms in the array. Even if the terms in each array are arranged alphabetically the purpose is not going to be disturbed. This feature of the classaurus makes it largely amenable to computerization.

The structure and style of presentation of a classaurus can be systematically presented as follows:

A) Systematic Part

A1 Common Modifiers

A1.1 Form

A1.2 Time

A1.3 Environment

A1 .4 Place

A2 Inter-subject Relation Modifiers

A3 Discipline and Sub-disciplines

A4 Entities

A4.1 Part

A4.2 Type

A5 Properties

A6 Actions

In respect of the systematic part, the following points are to be noted:

a) Each term in the systematic part under each category is enumerated by displaying its COS SCO relationship in a hierarchy of arrays.

b) For each term in the systematic part, the following follows vertically: (a) Definition/ Scope note (if required), and synonyms, quasi-synonyms, and antonyms.

c) No RTs (i.e. non-hierarchically related terms) are enumerated for any term in the classaurus because of its category-based structure. It is assumed that RTs should not be dictated by the designer of the classaurus, rather it should be dictated by the document itself. Any term may be related to any other terms depending upon the nature of the thought-content of the document. Hence, RTs should not be determined beforehand.

d) Each array in the classaurus is open.

e) Each term in the systematic part is assigned a unique address which can be used as a class number.

B) Alphabetical Index Part: This part contains each and every term including synonyms, quasi-synonyms, and antonyms occurring in the systematic part along with its address.

This Article Collected from:

• Sarkhel, J. (2017). Indexing languages. Retrieved from http://egyankosh .ac. in/handle /123456789/35770

The post Indexing language appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1.0 Introduction: An index is a guide to the items contained in or concepts derived from a collection. Item denotes any book, article, report, abstract review, etc. (textbook, part of a collection, passage in a book, an article in a journal, etc.). The word index has its origin in Latin and means: ‘to point out, to guide, to direct, to locate’. An index indicates or refers to the location of an object or idea. The definition according to the British standards (BS 3700: 1964) is “a systematic guide to the text of any reading matter or to the contents of other collected documentary material, comprising a series of entries, with headings arranged in alphabetical or other chosen order and with references to show where each item indexed is located”. An index is, thus, a working tool designed to help the user to find his way out the mass of documented information in a given subject field, or document store. It gives subject access to documents irrespective their physical forms like books, periodical articles, newspapers, AV documents, and computer-readable records including Web resources. (Indexing Process)

Early indexes were limited to personal names or occurrences of words in the text indexed, rather than topical (subject concept) indexes. Topical indexes are found at the beginning of the 18th century. In the nineteenth century, subject access to books was by means of a classification. Books were arranged by subject and their surrogates were correspondingly arranged in a classified catalogue. Only in the late 19th century, subject indexing became widespread and more systematic. Preparation of back-of-the-book index, historically, may be regarded as the father of all indexing techniques. Indexing techniques actually originated from these indexes. It was of two types: Specific index, which shows a broad topic on the form of one-idea-one-entry, i.e. the specific context of a specific idea; and Relative index, which shows various aspects of an idea and its relationship with other ideas. Specific index cannot show this, it only shows broad topic on the form of one-idea-one-entry, i.e. specific context of a specific idea. The readymade lists of subject headings like Sears List and LCSH fall far short of the actual requirement for depth indexing of micro documents in the sense that the terms are found to be too broad in the context of users’ areas of interest and of the thought content of the present-day micro document.

 1.1 Purpose of Indexing:

Indexing is regarded as the process of describing and identifying documents in terms of their subject contents. Here, The concepts are extracted from documents by the process of analysis, and then transcribed into the elements of the indexing systems, such as thesauri, classification schemes, etc.

In indexing decisions, concepts are recorded as data elements organised into easily accessible forms for retrieval. These records can appear in various forms, e.g. back-of-the-book indexes, indexes to catalogues and bibliographies, machine files, etc. The process of indexing has a close resemblance to the search process. Indexing procedures can be used, on one hand, for organising concepts into tools for information retrieval, and also, by analogy, for analysing and organising enquiries into concepts represented as descriptors or combinations of descriptors, classification symbols, etc. The main purposes of prescribing standard rules and procedures for subject indexing may be stated as follows:

1. To prescribe a standard methodology to subject cataloguers and indexers for constructing subject headings.
2. To be consistent in the choice and rendering of subject entries, using standard vocabulary and according to given rules and procedures.
3. To be helpful to users in accessing any desired document(s) from the catalogue or index through different means of such approach.
4. To decide on the optimum number of subject entries, and thus economise the bulk and cost of cataloguing indexing.

1.2 Problems in Indexing:

A number of problems and issues are associated with indexing which are enumerated below:

a) Complexities in the subjects of documents-usually multi-word concept:

b) Multidimensional users need for information;

c) Choice of terms from several synonyms;

d) Choice of word forms (Singular / Plural form);

e) Distinguishing homographs;

f) Identifying term relationships – Syntactic and Semantic;

g) Depth of indexing (exhaustivity);

h) Levels of generality and specificity for representation of concepts (specificity);

i) Ensuring consistency in indexing between several indexers (inter-indexer consistency), and by the same indexer at different times (intra-indexer consistency);

j) Ensuring that indexing is done not merely on the basis of a document’s intrinsic subject content but also according to the type of users who may be benefited from it and the types of requests for which the document is likely to be regarded as useful;

k) The kind of vocabulary to be used, and syntactical and other rules necessary for representing complex subjects; and

l) Problem of how to use the ‘index assignment data’.

It is necessary for each information system to define for itself an indexing policy, which spell out the level of exhaustivity to be adopted, a vocabulary that will ensure the required degree of specificity-rules, procedures and controls that will ensure consistency in indexing, and methods by which users may interact with the information system, so that indexing may, as far as possible, be related to and be influenced by user needs and search queries. The exhaustivity and specificity are management decisions. Since document retrieval is based on the logical matching of document index terms and the terms of a query, the operation of indexing is absolutely crucial. If documents are incompletely or inaccurately indexed, two kinds of retrieval errors occur viz. irrelevant documents retrieval and relevant documents non-retrieval.

When indexing, it is necessary to understand, at least in general terms, what the document is about (aboutness). The subject content of a document comprises a number of concepts or ideas. For e.g. an article on lubricants for cold rolling of aluminium alloys will contain information on lubricants, cold rolling, aluminium alloys etc. The indexer selects these concepts, which are of potential value for the purpose of retrieval, i.e., those concepts on which according to him, information is likely to be sought for by the users. It is the choice of concepts or the inner ability to recognise what a document is about is in the very heart of the indexing procedure. However, it is the identification of concepts that contributes to inconsistencies in indexing.

The problem of vocabulary deals the rules for deciding which terms are admissible for membership in the vocabulary. There is also a problem of how to determine the goodness or effectiveness of any vocabulary. This implies that the system ranks each of the documents in the collection by the probability that it will satisfy given query of the user. Thus, the output documents relating to a search query are ranked according to their probability of satisfaction.

1.3 Indexing Process:

Before indexing, the indexer should first take a look at the entire collection and make a series of decisions like,:

a) Does the collection contain any categories of material that should not be indexed?

b) Does the material require general, popular vocabulary in the index?

c) What is the nature of the collection?

d) What is the characteristics of the user population?

e) The physical environment in which the system will function; and

f) Display or physical appearance of the index.

Essentially, the processes of indexing consist of two stages: (i) establishing the concepts expressed in a document, i.e. the subject; and (ii) translating these concepts into the components of the indexing language.

a) Establishing the concepts expressed in a document:

The process of establishing the subject of a document can itself be divided into three stages:

i) Understanding the overall content of the document, the purpose of the author, etc:

Full comprehension about the content of the documents depends to a large extent on the form of the document. Two different cases can be distinguished, i.e. printed documents and non-printed documents. Full understanding of the printed documents depends upon an extensive reading of the text. However, this is not usually practicable, nor is it always necessary. The important parts of the text need to be considered carefully with particular attention to: title, abstract, introduction, the opening phrases of chapters and paragraphs, illustrations, tables, diagrams and their captions, the conclusion, words or groups of words which are underlined or printed in an unusual typeface. The author’s intentions are usually stated in the introductory sections, while the final sections generally state how far these aims are achieved.

The indexer should scan all these elements during his study of the document. Indexing directly from the title is not recommended, and an abstract, if available should not be regarded as a satisfactory substitute for a reading of the text. Titles may be misleading; both titles and abstracts may be inadequate in many cases, neither is a reliable source of the kind of information required by an indexer.

A different situation is likely to arise in the case of non-printed documents, such as audio-visual, visual, sound media and electronic media.

ii) Identification of concepts:

After examining the document, the indexer needs to follow a logical approach in selecting those concepts that best express its content. The selection of concepts can be related to a schema of categories recognised as important in the field covered by the document, e.g. phenomena, processes, properties operations, equipment etc. For example, when indexing works on ‘Drug therapy’, the indexer should check systematically for the presence or the absence of concepts relating to specific diseases, the name and type of drug, route of administration, results obtained and/or side effects, etc. Similarly, documents on the ‘Synthesis of chemical compounds’ should be searched for concepts indicating the manufacturing process, the operating conditions, and the products obtained, etc”.

iii) Selection of concepts:

The indexer does not necessarily need to retain, as indexing elements, all the concepts identified during the examination of the document. The choice of those concepts, which should be selected or rejected, depends on the purpose for which the indexing data will be used. Various kinds of purpose can be identified, ranging from the production of printed alphabetical indexes to the mechanized storage of data elements for subsequent retrieval. The kind of document being indexed may also affect the product. For example, indexing derived directly from the text of books, journal articles, etc. is likely to differ from that derived only from abstracts. However, the selection of concepts in indexing is governed by the Indexing policy: exhaustivity and specificity adopted by the given system (See Section 4.2.7 of this Unit).

b) Translating the concepts into the indexing language:

In the next stage in subject indexing is to translate the selected concepts into the language of the indexing system. At this stage, an indexing can be looked from two different levels: document level, which is known as Derivative indexing; and concept level, which is known as Assignment indexing. Derivative indexing is the indexing by extraction. Words or phrases actually occurring in a document can be selected or extracted directly from the document (keyword indexing, automatic indexing, etc.). Here, no attempt is made to use the indexing language, but to use only the words or phrases, which are manifested in the document. Assignment indexing (also known as ‘concept Indexing) involves the conceptual analysis of the contents of a document for selecting concepts expressed in it, assigning terms for those concepts from some form of controlled vocabulary according to given rules and procedures for displaying syntactic and semantic relationships (e.g. Chain Indexing, PRECIS, POPSI, Classification Schemes, etc.). Here, an indexing language is designed and it is used for both indexing and search process.

1.4 Indexing Language:

An indexing language is an artificial language consisting of a set of terms and devices for handling the relationship between them for providing index description. It is also referred to as a retrieval language. An indexing language is ‘artificial’ in the sense that it may depend upon the vocabulary of natural language, though not always, but its syntax, semantics, word forms, etc. would be different from a natural language. Thus, an indexing language consists of elements that constitute its vocabulary (i.e. controlled vocabulary), rules for admissible expression (i.e. syntax) and semantics. More discussion on indexing languages can be seen in the Indexing language.

1.5 Theory of Indexing:

The lack of an indexing theory to explain the indexing process is a major blind spot in information retrieval. Very little seems to have been written about the role and value of theory in indexing. Those who have written about it, however, tend to agree that it serves a vital function. One important function of the theory of indexing is to establish an agenda for research. Equally important, by identifying gaps it suggests what remains to be investigated. Theories also supply a rationale for, or an argument against, current practices in subject indexing. They can put things in perspective, or provide a new and different perspective.

The contributions made by K P Jones and R. Fugmann [Quinn, 1994] in indexing theory are worth mentioning. According to Jones, an indexing theory should consist of five levels, which are as follow:

a) Concordance level: It consists of references to all words in the original text arranged in alphabetical order.

b) Information-theoretic level: This level calculates the likelihood of a word being chosen for indexing based on its frequency of occurrence within a text. For example, the more frequently a word appears, the less likely it is to be selected because of the indexer reasons the document ‘all about that’.

c) Linguistic level: This level of indexing theory attempts to explain how meaningful words are extracted from large units of text. Indexers regard opening paragraphs, chapters and/or sections, and opening and closing sentences of paragraphs are more likely to be a source of indexable Units, as are definitions.

d) Textual level: Beyond individual words or phrases lies the fourth level—the textual or skeletal framework. The author in his/her work presents ideas in an organized manner, which produces a skeletal structure clothed in text. The successful indexer needs to identify this skeleton by searching for clues on the surface.

e) Inferential level: An indexer is able to make inferences about the relationships between words or phrases by observing the paragraph and sentence structure, and stripping the sentence of extraneous detail. This inference level makes it possible for the indexer to identify novel subject areas.

Indexing theory proposed by Robert Fugmann is based on five general axioms, which he claims have obvious validity and in need of no proof and they explain all currently known phenomena in information supply. These five axioms are:

a) Axiom of definability: Compiling information relevant to a topic can only be accomplished to the degree to which a topic can be defined.

b) Axiom of order: Any compilation of information relevant to a topic is an order creating process.

c) Axiom of the sufficient degree of order: The demands made on the degree of order increase as the size of a collection and frequency of searches increase.

d) Axiom of predictability: It says that the success of any directed search for relevant information hinges on how readily predictable or reconstructible are the modes of expression for concepts and statements in the search file. This axiom is based on the belief that the real purpose of vocabulary control devices is to enhance representational predictability.

e) Axiom of fidelity: It equates the success of any directed search for relevant information with the fidelity with which concepts and statements are expressed in the search file.

Like theories in other disciplines, these theories of indexing are developed provisionally, with the understanding that subsequent research will either support or refute them.

1.6 Indexing Criteria:

It is possible, however, to minimize inconsistencies in indexing. Requiring that indexers systematically test the indexability of concepts by using a set of criteria can do this. It is obviously not possible to suggest criteria that would produce the same results when used by the same indexer at different times or by more than one indexer at the same time. The criteria at best enable greater agreement between indexers about concepts that should be indexed. Some of these criteria are given below in the form of a checklist of questions that indexers can ask themselves when faced with a document, to be indexed.

1. To what extent the document is about a particular concept? Mere mention of any concept in the document does not make it indexable. If the concept was a reason for the document or if without the concept the document would either not exist or be significantly altered, then the concept is worth indexing.

2. Is there enough information about the concept in the document? This is always a matter of judgment and indexers may disagree with one another about what constitutes ‘enough information’. However, experience in indexing, in answering queries, and subject knowledge can go a long way in arriving at good decisions concerning this question.

3. Another way of testing the indexability of a concept would be for the indexer to ask himself: would a user, searching for information on this concept, be happy if the document on hand is retrieved? Is there a likelihood of the concept figuring in search queries?

The answer to these questions would not only indicate the indexability of concepts but also the level of specificity at which concepts need to be indexed. To decide on the factors mentioned above, the indexer should have good judgment capacity, experience in answering search queries or reference service, a good understanding of users and their information needs.

1.7 Indexing Policy: Exhaustivity and Specificity:

Exhaustivity is a matter of an indexing policy and it is the measure of the extent to which all the distinct subjects are discussed in a particular document are recognized in indexing operation, and translated into the language of the system. Exhaustivity in indexing requires more number of index entries focusing different concepts (both primary and secondary) covered in the documents. The greater the number of concepts selected for indexing purpose, the more exhaustive is the indexing. If, in a given document, concepts A, B, C, D, E are selected for indexing then the indexing of the document is more exhaustive than if only concepts A< B< C are selected. When a relatively large number of concepts are indexed for each document, the policy followed is one of depth of indexing. Depth of indexing, in other words, allows for the recognition of concepts embodied not only in the main theme of the document but also in sub-themes of varying importance. Policy decision in respect of exhaustivity in indexing depends upon several factors like strength of collection, manpower available, economy and requirements of users.

In selecting a concept, the main criterion should always be its potential value as an element in expressing the subject content of the document. In making a choice of concepts, the indexer should constantly bear in mind the questions (as far as these can be known), which may be put to the information system. In effect, this criterion re-states the principal function of indexing. With this in mind, the indexer should:

1. choice the concepts, which would be regarded as most, appropriate by a given community of users; and
2. if necessary, modify both indexing tools and procedures as a result of feedback from enquiries.

Limit to the number of terms or descriptors, which can be assigned to a document should not be decided arbitrarily. This should be determined entirely by the amount of information contained in the document. Any arbitrary limit is likely to lead to loss of objectivity in the indexing, and to the distortion of information that would be of value for retrieval. If for economic reasons, the number of terms is to be limited, the selection of concepts should be guided by the indexer’s judgment concerning the relative importance of concepts in expressing the overall subject of the document.

In many cases, the indexer needs to include, as part of the indexing data, concepts which are present only by implication, but which serve to set a given concept into an appropriate context.

Specificity is the degree of the preciseness of the subject to express the thought content of the documents. It is the measure of the extent to which the indexing system permits the indexers to be precise when specifying the subject of the document. An indexing language is considered to be of high specificity if minute concepts are represented precisely by it. It is an intrinsic quality of the index language itself.

As a rule, concepts should be identified as specifically as possible. More general concepts may be selected in some circumstances, depending upon the purpose of the information retrieval system. In particular, the level of specificity may be affected by the weight attached to a concept by the author. If the indexer considers that an idea is not fully developed, or is referred to only casually by the author, indexing at a more general level may be justified.

Both Exhaustivity and Specificity are very closely related to recall and precision. A high level of exhaustivity increases recall and a high level of specificity increases precision.

1.8 Quality Control in Indexing:

The quality of indexing is defined in terms of its retrieval effectiveness—the ability to retrieve what is wanted and to avoid what is not. The quality of indexing depends on two factors: (i) the qualification of the indexer; and (ii) the quality of the indexing tools.

An indexing failure on the part of the indexer may take place at two stages of indexing process: establishing the concepts expressed in a document, and their translation. Failure in establishing concepts expressed in a document could be of two types:

a) Failure to identify a topic that is of potential interest to the target user group; and

b) Misinterpretation of the content of the document, leading to the selection of inappropriate term(s).

Translation failures may be of three types:

a) Failure to use the most specific terms) to represent the subject of the document;

b) Use of inappropriate term(s) for the subject of a document because of the lack of subject knowledge or due to lack of seriousness on the part of the indexer; and

c) Omission of important term(s).

For a given information system, the indexing data assigned to a given document should be consistently the same regardless of the individual indexer. Consistency is a measure that relates to the work of two or more indexers. It should, remain relatively stable throughout the life of a particular indexing system. Consistency is particularly important if information is to be exchanged between agencies in a documentary network. An important factor in reaching the level of consistency is complete impartiality by the indexes. Almost inevitable, some elements of subjective judgment will affect indexing performance and these needs to be minimized as far as possible. Consistency is more difficult to achieve with a large indexing team, or with teams of indexer working in different location (as in a decentralized system). In this situation, a centralized check stage may be helpful.

The indexer should preferably be a specialist in the field for which the document is indexed. He should understand the term of the documents as well as the rules and procedures of the specific indexing system.

Quality control would be achieved more effectively if the indexers have contact with users. They could then, for example, determine whether certain descriptors may produce false combinations, and also create noise at the output stage.

Indexing quality is also dependent upon certain properties of the indexing method or procedure. It is essential that an index should be able to accommodate new terminology, and also new needs of users—that is, it must allow frequent updating.

Indexing quality can be tested by analysis of retrieval results, e.g. by calculating recall and precision ratios.

This Article Collected From:

• Unit-4 Indexing Systems and Techniques. (2017). Retrieved from http://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/11150

The post Indexing Process and Principles appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

There has always been confusion about the distinction between ‘subject cataloguing’ and ‘subject indexing‘. Basically, cataloguing is the process of creating bibliographic description of a document as a whole entity, and subject cataloguing and classification assign subject labels which together descnbe the overall topic of the document. Indexing involves delving into a document for analysing its contents at a much deeper level to provide access to many of the concepts contained within it at greater depth. Although most articles in a periodical issue and many books are listed under only one or two subject headings, a back-of-the-book index contains hundreds of subject terms associated with the content of an individual book.

Subject cataloguing usually refers to the assignment of subject headings to represent the overall contents of whole documents (e.g. books, reports, periodicals, etc.) within the catalogue of a library. Subject indexing is a term used more loosely; it may refer to the representation of the subject matter of the parts of whole documents as in the case of a back-of-the-book subject index. Thus, a library may enter a book under the subject heading ‘noses’ in its catalogue to indicate its overall subject matter, the detailed contents of the book are only revealed by the back-of-the-book subject index. This distinction between the terms ‘subject cataloguing’ and ‘subject indexing’, one referring to complete bibliographic items and other to parts of them, is artificial, misleading, and inconsistent. The process by which the subject matter of documents is represented in databases-printed or electronic form-is almost referred to as ‘subject indexing’, whether overall documents or their parts are discussed. Thus, the subject index might refer to the representation of the content of the complete books or complete technical reports as well as to the parts of documents (e.g. chapters in books, papers within the periodicals or conference proceedings, etc.). On the other hand, libraries may choose to represent parts of books (e.g. chapters or papers) within the catalogue which is usually referred to as analytical cataloguing.

The situation is even more confusing when the term classification is considered. The term classification refers to the process of assigning class numbers, drawn from a given classification scheme, to documents, especially for the purpose of arranging these items on the shelves of the libraries, in catalogues, etc. But the subject catalogue of a library can be either alphabetically based (in an alphabetical subject catalogue or dictionary catalogue) or arranged according to the sequence of a classification scheme (in a classified catalogue). Suppose a librarian picks up a book and decides that it is about ‘banking’. He or she might assign the subject heading Banking to this document. Alternatively, the Dewey Decimal classification number 332.1 may be assigned to it. Many people would refer to the first operation as subject cataloguing and to the second as classification. These terminological distinctions are quite meaningless and only serve to create confusion due to failure to understand the distinction between the conceptual analysis and translation stage in indexing. In short, subject indexing is conceptually identical to subject cataloguing. Its process involves classification, forming classes of objects on the basis of their subject matter and representing them either in the verbal plane (by using a readymade list of subject headings or a thesaurus) or in the notational plane (by using a scheme of classification). In this Unit, the term subject indexing or simply indexing is used as a matter of convenience to refer to all activities of subject cataloguing.

Article Collected From:

• Sarkhel, J. (2017). Unit-9 Basics of Subject Indexing. Retrieved from http://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/35769

The post Cataloguing Versus Indexing appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1. Introduction: All library work is a matter of storage and retrieval of information, and cataloguing and indexing are specially performed to achieve that. Subject cataloguing is intended to embrace only that activity which provides a verbal subject approach to materials added to library collections. Subject indexing is used in information retrieval especially to create index records to retrieve documents on a particular subject. Descriptive cataloguing makes it possible to retrieve the materials in a library by title, author, etc. – in short, all the searchable elements of a cataloguing record except the subjects.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, descriptive cataloguing was the basic library cataloguing practice that was found necessary. Libraries were much smaller than they are today, and scholarly librarians then were able, with the aid of printed bibliographies, to be familiar with everything available on a given subject and guide the users to it. With the rapid growth of knowledge in many fields during the nineteenth century and the resulting increase in the volume of books and periodicals, it became desirable to do a preliminary subject analysis of such works and then represent them in the catalogue or in printed indexes in such a way that they could be retrievable by subject. Subject cataloguing deals with what a book or other library item is about, and its purpose is to list, under one uniform word or phrase all the materials on a given topic that a library has in its collection. A subject heading is a uniform word or phrase used in the library catalogue to express a topic. The use of authorized words or phrases only, with cross-references from unauthorized synonyms, is the essence of bibliographic control in subject cataloguing. In the literature of LIS, the phrases subject cataloguing and subject indexing are used more or less interchangeably. In this context, it is to be pointed out here that it was Charles Ammi Cutter who first gave a generalized set of rules for subject indexing in his Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue (RDC) published in 1876. But he never used the term ‘indexing’; rather he used the term ‘cataloguing’. In this course material, the phrase subject indexing includes subject cataloguing also. The literature differentiates the two as subject cataloguing is intended to embrace only that cataloguing activity which provides a verbal subject approach to library collections, especially macro documents (i.e. books). It refers to the determination and assignment of suitable entries for use in the subject component of a library’s catalogue. The primary purpose of the subject catalogue is to show which books on a specific subject are possessed by the library. Subject indexing refers to that indexing activity which provides a verbal subject approach to micro documents (e.g., journal articles, research reports, patent literature, etc.). Subject indexing provides a subject entry for every topic associated with the content of a micro document.

The representation of documents and the knowledge expressed by them is one of the central and unique areas of study within Library and Information Science (LIS) and is commonly referred to as indexing. Subject approach to information has been a long and extensive concern of librarianship and is assumed to be the major approach (access method) of users for a very long period. Indexing has traditionally been one of the most important research topics in information science. Indexes facilitate retrieval of information in both traditional manual systems and newer computerized systems. Without proper indexing and indexes, search and retrieval are virtually impossible.

2. Subject Indexing: Origin and Development:

The origin and development of subject indexing are intimately related to the historical development of libraries through ancient and medieval periods to modern days. The libraries of the ancient world used to arrange documents under some subjects. The catalogue, which worked as an index to this store, was predominantly a systematic subject listing according to a scheme of subject headings. The arrangement more or less conformed to the arrangement of documents in the store.

The specific usage of the term index goes back to ancient Rome. There, when used in relation to literary works, the term index was used for the little slip attached to papyrus scrolls on which the title of the work (and sometimes also the name of the author) was written so that each scroll on the shelves could be easily identified without having to pull them out for inspection. From this developed the usage of the index for the title of books. In the first century A.D., the meaning of the word was extended from “title” to a table of contents or a list of chapters (sometimes with a brief abstract of their contents) and hence to a bibliographical list or catalogue. Only the invention of printing around 1450 made it possible to produce identical copies of books in large numbers, so that soon afterward the first indexes began to be compiled, especially those to books of reference. By the end of 13th-century alphabetization by names of authors under the systematic subject, the arrangement was well known. The index to the store or the shelf-list used to be supplemented with an author index to satisfy the author approach of the users of the store. Index entries were not always alphabetized by considering every letter in a word from beginning to end. Most early indexes were arranged only by the first letter of the first word, the rest being left in no particular order at all. Gradually, alphabetization advanced to an arrangement by the first syllable, that is, the first two or three letters, the rest of the entry still being left unordered.

The 15^th century saw the entry of the university libraries which brought about a qualitative change. Efforts were made to rank subjects and on devising indexing or cataloguing methods for better utilization of documents. Towards the end of the 15^th century, the practice of supplementing systematic listing with an alphabetical subject index was introduced. Only very few indexes compiled in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries had fully alphabetized entries, but by the 18^th century, full alphabetization became the rule. Alphabetical indexing gained new momentum as intellectual debates among the scholars required ready reference to scholarly works with the rise of universities. The pressmarks, which were mainly used for storage of documents, started being used in catalogues as a retrieval tool. But the press marks could not ensure a flexible hierarchical order of subjects and hence it was discarded in favor of notation. In the 19^th century, subject access to books was provided by means of classification. Books were arranged by subject and their surrogates were correspondingly arranged in a classified catalogue. Only in the late 19^th century, alphabetical subject indexing became widespread and more systematic. The classification system was primitive in nature. It could not go deep enough to the extent of individualizing subjects of documents. The separate existence of the classed catalogues and indexes stirred up the imagination for the compilation of a catalogue which was very much akin to a dictionary in form. Thus were born the forerunners of our dictionary and classified catalogues.

Preparation of back-of-the-book index, historically, maybe regarded as the father of all indexing techniques. Indexing techniques actually originated from this index. It was of two types: Specific index, which shows broad topic on the form of one-idea-one-entry, i.e. the specific context of a specific idea; and Relative index, which shows various aspects of an idea and its relationship with other ideas. The specific index cannot show this, it only shows a broad topic on the form of one-idea-one-entry, i.e. the specific context of a specific idea.

The dictionary catalogue brought some relief into the sharp conflict between subjects of documents and the practice of naming them. Charles Ammie Cutter, who was both a classificationist as well as a theoretician of the library catalogue, observed that the name of the subject assigned to a document did not indicate its specific subject. Rather it indicated the class to which the subject of the document belonged to. For example, assigning the subject ‘plant’ to a document discussing the plant ‘cactus’. The practice

was deficient in helping a user who came for information on a specific subject. The root of the conflict remained deep in the classification system also as the classification was not coextensive with the subjects of the documents. Hence, whatever was left out in classification became conspicuous by their absence while giving class names to individual entries as the subject heading. Cutter, who was an advocate of dictionary catalogue wanted to solve the conflict at the cataloguing level. The year 1876 is particularly important for the library profession for the publication of two outstanding books:

(1) A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library, by Melvil Dewey; and

(2) Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue, by Charles Ammie Cutter.

The first sought to solve the problems by organizing the document store and simultaneously providing an alphabetical subject index for easy access to it while the second, expressing doubts about the efficacy of class headings to be used as specific subject heading, decided to go through a different way by some specific method for naming of the subjects. While Dewey offers a ready made list of names (class names in this case) Cutter suggested some methods for building them up in order to name them more specifically. Cutter’s rules for specific subject headings for use in a dictionary catalogue seemed to have appealed the library professional. Subsequently, there was a demand for some ‘standard list of subject headings’ which could be used in carrying out the specifications in Cutter’s rules. This paved the way for the publication of a list of subject headings by the American Library Association (ALA), to be used in a dictionary catalogue. The list was later revised and published in two more editions which ultimately established a pattern for subsequent subject heading lists like subject headings used in the dictionary catalogue of Library of Congress and Sears List of Subject Headings.

Use of the above standard lists of subject headings raised important questions relating to the use of terminology (whether common or popular terms or scientific and technical terms were to be used), and sequencing of terms in the subject heading (what should be the sequence of terms in case of compound subject headings). But Cutter, as well as compilers of several standard lists of subject headings, failed to provide satisfactory answers to the above-noted questions.

The first quest for a logical approach towards solving the above-noted problems is evident in J. Kaiser’s Systematic Indexing (1911). Kaiser was the first person who gave the idea of categorizing the terms under two fundamental categories: concretes and processes. He recommended the citation order of these categories into the index string. Kaiser suggested that many composite subjects could be analyzed into a combination of concepts indicating a ‘concrete’ object and a ‘process’. In such cases, the concrete should be given precedence over ‘process’ in the order of citation of index terms in a compound subject heading. Kaiser failed to analyze deeply the various types of intricacies involved in the naming of subjects. Nevertheless, his work remains unique till date as he is the first person to suggest certain logical processes for naming subjects in terms of fundamental categories and a citation order of index strings.

Dr. S. R. Ranganathan was the first to analyze the universe of subjects in depth and suggesting a complete theory of naming subjects using a subject indexing language. He realized the fallacy of trying to symbolize the extremely flexible and dynamic multidimensional universe of subjects into a linear, rigid notational model. Just as ready-made class numbers cannot be given according to his scheme of classification to all subjects of the past, present, and future, so also subject headings cannot be made available ready-made. He, therefore, enunciated certain rules on the basis of which subject names could be framed. Ranganthan developed a mechanical procedure for doing it and called it the chain procedure. The basic contention of chain procedure is that a multidimensional universe of subjects cannot be fitted into a rigid one-dimensional model and hence, a chain of terms is required to name a subject where the term indicating the specific subject is stated in a particular context. Chain procedure demonstrated that it is not necessary to depend on the flair of some authorities for the supply of names of subjects. One can very well build up one’s own authority file and use subject names consistently. The names used will be uniform for all libraries following the same scheme of classification. The chain, which is a string of terms, gets organized or arranged following the classification scheme used. Qualities of the classification scheme therefore very much determine the qualities of the subject headings drawn according to chain procedure.

J. E. L. Farradane devised a scheme of pre-coordinate indexing system known as Relational Indexing in the early 1950s. The basic proposition of Farradane’s Relational Indexing was to identify the relationship between concepts by following the learning process through which we develop our power of discrimination in time and space. Farradane’s Relational Indexing has been the subject of scholarly research but was never implemented. Still, we can say that Farradane’s contribution to the area of subject indexing was: analysis of the relationship among each pair of terms, use of relational operators, and representation of the relationship among terms by relational operators leading to the creation of `Analets’. `Analee refers to a pair of terms linked by any of the relational operators as developed by Farradane. Each relational operator is denoted by a slash and a special symbol having a unique memory. For example,

The contribution of E. J. Coates in subject indexing was not original in nature. Coates merely synthesized the ideas of Cutter, Kaiser, Ranganathan, and Farradane. Coates applied his idea on British Technology Index (now Current Technology Index) of which he was an editor from its inception in 1963 until his retirement in 1976.

Preserved Context Index System (PRECIS), developed by Derek Austin and applied to BNB in 1971 as an alternative to the chain procedure for deriving subject index entries, sought to rectify the problem of co-extensiveness by generating entries with a lead term and the full context of the document. Depending heavily on the computer to generate mechanically all index entries from input strings, PRECIS developed its own code for preparation of input strings by the human indexer and its subsequent processing by computer. Its emphasis has been on generating a printed index for BNB. Though PRECIS was fairly successful in its original mission it does not have the simplicity of chain procedure and considerable skill is required to use it effectively.

Postulate-based Permuted Subject Indexing (POPSI) sought to overcome the shortcomings of chain procedure from an entirely different perspective. It recommended postulates and principles for analyzing the subjects into elementary categories and their subsequent ordering. The postulates are not rigid and hence give flexibility to indexers. As it is essentially distilled out of chain procedure it has managed to retain most of the helpful features of chain procedure such as simplicity. Over the years, Bhattacharya,

Neelameghan, Devadasan, Gopinath, and others have given a sound theoretical foundation to POPSI in terms of ‘General Theory of Subject Indexing Languages’ (GT-SIL). The GT-SIL seeks to analyze the deep structure of Subject Indexing Languages in terms of semantic structure, elementary structure and syntactic structure of subject propositions. In essence, GT-SIL is a logical abstraction of the structures of outstanding subject indexing languages such as those of Cutter, Dewey, Kaiser, and Ranganathan.

It is evident from the above discussion that the research on the development and use of various subject indexing systems was devoted to techniques of constructing pre-coordinate subject headings. A greater part of the pre-coordinate subject indexing system was devoted to syntactical rules of indexing. Rigidity of significance order may not meet the approaches of all users of the index file, though this problem is solved by rotating terms or multiple entry system. It is also evident that even the acceptance of multiple entry system covers only a fraction of the possible number of total permutations. Thus, a large portion of probable approaches or access points is left uncovered. This gap widens rapidly with every increase in the number of terms in a subject heading due to the demand for more specific subject headings. The index file may fail to provide a particular combination which the user is looking for. It may also provide a combination which proves too broad for a particular search. The above considerations and difficulties stemming from the pre-coordination of terms led to the development of post-coordinate indexing or simply coordinate indexing systems like Uniterm, Optical Coincidence Card / Peek-a-boo, Edge-Notched Card, etc during the 1960s.

Computers began to be used to aid information retrieval in the 1950s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of USA is said to be the first organization to use the machine-produced keywords from Title Index since 1952. H P Luhn and his associates produced and distributed copies of machine produced permuted title indexes in the International Conference of Scientific Information held at Washington in 1958, which he named as Keyword-In-Context (KWIC) index and reported the method of generation of KWIC index in a paper. American Chemical Society established the value of KWIC after its adoption in 1961 for its publication ‘Chemical Titles’. A number of varieties of keyword index are evident in the literature. They differ only in terms oftheir formats but indexing techniques remain more or less the same.

The publication of Science Citation Index (SCI) by Eugene Garfield of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia in 1963 provided a new approach to the bibliographic file organization. The online version ofthe SCI, known as SCISEARCH, was published in 1974. ISI also brought out the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) in 1973 and 1978 respectively. The publication of the citation classics, with the first issue of Current Contents in 1977, forms an important and interesting venture ofthe ISI.

It has already been mentioned above that the traditional subject indexing systems and techniques have taken a new turn with the applications of computers in the 1950s. In fact, all attempts at computerised indexing were based on two basic methods: Statistical analysis; and Syntactic and semantic analysis. In the arena of computerised indexing, there has been considerable research on the user-interface design, indexing systems using Artificial Intelligence techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Representation Model and Expert System-based subject indexing systems. As a result of the phenomenal growth of content on the web as an indexing problem, we have seen a continued interest in the development of tools and techniques to index the Web resources. Different search tools and technologies were developed in finding the resources on the Web so far to make computers understand the semantics underlying contents of the web resources.

3. Meaning and Purpose of Index:

The term index came from the Latin word indicare which means ‘to point out, to guide, to direct, to locate’. An index indicates or refers to the location of an object or idea. It is a methodically arranged list of items or concepts along with their addresses. The process of preparing an index is known as indexing. According to the British Standards (BS 3700: 1964), an index is “a systematic guide to the text of any reading matter or to the contents of other collected documentary material, comprising a series of entries, with headings arranged in alphabetical or other chosen order and with references to show where each item indexed is located”. An index is, thus, a working tool designed to help the user to find his way out of a mass of documented information in a given subject field, or document store. It gives subject access to documents irrespective their physical forms like books, periodical articles, newspapers, audio-visual documents, and computer-readable records including web resources.

It appears from the foregoing discussion that an index indicates or refers to the location of an object/idea/concept. A concept is a unit of thought. The semantic content of a concept can be re-expressed by a combination of other and different concepts, which may vary from one language or culture to another. What the particular body of information is about, in a document constitute its subject. A subject can be defined as any concept or combination of concepts representing a theme in a document. An indexing term is defined as the representation of a concept in the form of either a term derived from natural language or a classification symbol.

A subject is then any concept or combination of concepts which is expressed in the document. The readers’ task is to interpret the words and sentences in the document in order to understand the concepts. Whether a reader understands a document depends on how precisely the author expresses the concepts he refers to and whether the reader is aware of the concepts the author expresses. The basic idea is that the concepts exist before the author writes the document and the reader reads the document.

Similarly, the indexer’s task is to identify concepts in the document and re-express these in indexing terms. This is done first by establishing the subject content, or in other words the content of concepts in the document. Thereafter the principal concept presented in the subject content is identified, and finally, the concepts are expressed in the indexing language. The indexing is successful when the document and the indexing term express the same concepts.

Purpose:

Modem subject indexing practice has its roots in Charles Ammi Cutter’s Rules for a Dictionary Catalog published in 1876. Cutter’s statement of the basic objectives of a catalogue is:

(i) To enable a person to find a book of which the subject is known, and

(ii) To show what the library has on a given subject (and related subjects).

This implies that the main purpose of subject indexing is to satisfy the subject query of the users by enabling an enquirer to identify documents on a given subject and providing information on the presence of material on allied or related subjects.

The first objective refers to the need to locate individual items, and the second refers to the need to collocate materials on the same subject as well as related subjects. A subject is a set of interrelated component ideas in which each component idea is related directly or indirectly to other component ideas. A subject of a document is amenable for structuring into subject heading. It is a kind of linear structuring of subject surrogates, and some criteria for formatting or modeling it into an accessible procedure. The purpose of subject indexing is to:

a) satisfy the subject approach to information;

b) identify pertinent materials on a given subject or topic;

c) enable the enquirer to find materials on related subjects;

d) link related subjects by a network of references;

e) prescribe a standard methodology to subject cataloguers/indexers for constructing uniform subject headings;

f) bring consistency in the choice and rendering of subject entries, using standard vocabulary and according to the given rules and procedures;

g) be helpful to users in accessing any desired document from the catalogue or index through different means of such approach;

h) decide on the optimum number of subject entries, and thus economize the bulk and cost of indexing; and

i) provide user-oriented approach in naming the subjects through any vocabulary common to a considerable group of users, specialists or laymen.

4.Indexing Principles and Process:

4.1 Need and Purpose of Indexing Principles:

Before we discuss the principles of indexing, it is important to know why we need to have principles of indexing. We need principles of indexing:

1) To set out the general directions for the consistent application of subject indexing techniques;

2) To serve as a useful guide for developing new indexing techniques and to develop one that already exists;

3) To facilitate the evaluation of indexing systems;

4) To provide theoretical rationale for particular standards or guidelines for designing subject indexing system and its application;

5) To promote understanding of different subject indexing systems by identifying commonalities underlying them and providing a structure for their comparison; and

6) To determine how the subject headings are established and applied.

4.2 Indexing Principles:

Indexing principles may be stated as:

a) The user as focus: The wording and structure of the subject heading should match what the user will seek in the index;

b) Unity: A subject index must bring together, under one heading all the documents which deal principally or exclusively with the subject, whatever the terms, applied to it by the authors and whatever the varying terms, applied to it at different times. It must use a term which is unambiguous and does not overlap in meaning with other headings in the index.

c) Common Usage: The subject heading chosen must represent common usage or, at any rate, the usage of the class of users for whom the documents on the subject within which the heading falls are intended. Whether a popular term or a scientific one is to be chosen should depend on the approaches of the users.

d) Specificity: The heading should be as specific as the topic it is intended to cover. As a corollary, the heading should not be broader than the topic. Rather than using a broader heading, the cataloguer should use two specific headings which will approximately cover it.

4.3 Indexing Policy:

Indexers must take policy decisions about how many terms should be included in an index entry, how specific the terms should be and how many entries an index should incorporate. Together this gives a depth of indexing. The depth of indexing describes the thoroughness of the indexing process with reference to exhaustivity and specificity. While taking such a policy decision, indexers should strive for a balance between specificity and exhaustivity and should consider the requirement of the users of the index along with the cost and time factors.

Exhaustivity in Indexing:

Exhaustivity in indexing is the detail with which the topics or features of a document are analyzed and described. In other words, an exhaustive index is one which lists all possible index terms associated with the thought content of a document. In contrast to higher exhaustivity, higher specificity increases precision at the cost of the impaired recall. Greater exhaustivity gives a higher recall leading to the retrieval of all the relevant documents along with the retrieval of a large number of irrelevant documents or documents which only deal with the subject in little depth.

Specificity in Indexing:

The specificity describes how closely the index terms match the topics they represent in a document. It is the extent to which the indexing system permits us to be precise when specifying the subject of a document we are processing. Higher specificity leads to high precision, whereas lower specificity will lead to low precision, but high recall. Specific indexing provides specific terms for all or most topics and features and results in a larger indexing vocabulary than more generic indexing. Specificity tends to increase with exhaustivity in indexing vocabulary as the more terms we include, the narrower those terms will be. A high level of specificity increases precision.

4.4 Indexing Process:

The representation of documents and the knowledge expressed by them is one of the central and unique areas of study within library and information science (LIS) and is commonly referred to as indexing. A common demand in the LIS field is for a set of rules or a prescription for how to index. When this demand is raised it is usually based on the assumption that it is possible to explain the intellectual operations in the subject indexing process. The indexing process basically consists of two intellectual steps: conceptual analysis and translation.

Conceptual analysis:

This step refers to the identification of different component ideas associated with the thought content of the document and the establishment of the interrelationship between those component ideas. According to Ranganathan, it involves the work in the idea plane which is carried out in two stages, although these tend to overlap in practice:

a) examining the document and establishing its subject content;

b) identifying the principal concepts present in the subject;

a) Examining the document and establishing its subject content: In the first stage of the conceptual analysis of the thought content of the document, it is examined for the establishment of its subject content. A complete reading of the document often is impracticable, but the indexer should ensure that no useful information has been overlooked. While examining the document, the indexer should give particular attention to a number of places in the document: the title; the abstract, if provided; the list of contents; the introduction, the opening chapters and paragraphs, and the conclusion; illustrations, diagrams, tables and their captions; words or groups of words which are underlined or printed in an unusual typeface.

b) Identifying the principal concepts present in the subject: In this stage of the indexing process the indexer identifies the principal concepts in the subject. The second stage is laid over the first stage in the sense that the indexer should not go back to the document to look for concepts. Rather, the indexer should look for concepts within the findings of the first step; that is the natural language representations of the subject content. The indexer does not necessarily need to retain, as indexing elements, all the concepts identified during the examination of the document. After examining the document, the indexer needs to follow a logical approach in selecting those concepts that best express its subject. While selecting the principal concepts of the document the indexer should take into consideration the purpose for which the indexing data will be used. Indexing data may be used for the purpose like preparation of subject headings for the subject catalogue, production of printed alphabetical indexes to different types of information products, and computerized storage of indexing data elements for subsequent retrieval of the documents.

Translation:

During the first two stages, the indexer has established the subject content of the document and identified the principal concepts in the subject. The indexer is hereafter ready to translate the concepts into the indexing language. This step refers to the expression of principal concepts as identified while analyzing the thought content of the document into the language of the indexing system. According to Ranganathan, it involves the work in the verbal plane which calls for the familiarity with different components of the given indexing language: controlled vocabulary, syntax and semantics including their working roles for displaying the indexing data in a subject index.

If the concepts that the indexer has identified during the second stage are present in the indexing language the indexer should translate the concept into preferred terms. At this point in the indexing process, the indexer should be aware that indexing languages may impose certain constraints in translating the concepts. If the indexer uses a controlled indexing language, this may not permit the exact representation of a concept encountered in a document. The concern is that the concepts that the indexer identified during the second stage of the indexing process might not be present in the indexing language. The indexer is then forced either to choose a term that does not express exactly the same concept or add a new term to the vocabulary to represent the concept. Here, the indexer is required to be familiar with the particular indexing language and the specific rules and mechanisms of the indexing language.

4.5 Indexing Language:

An indexing language is a set of terms and devices used to establish the relationship between terms for representing the content of the documents as well as queries of the users. It consists of three basic elements: controlled vocabulary, syntax and semantics. Controlled vocabulary has been defined as a limited set of terms showing their relationships and indicating ways in which they may usefully be combined to provide a subject index to the documents and to search for these documents, in a particular system. Syntax comprises a grammatical structure or a set of rules that govern the sequence of occurrence of terms/words in representing the content of the document. Semantics refers to the systematic study of how meaning is structured, expressed and understood in the use of an indexing language. More discussion on indexing languages can be seen in another post.

4.6 Problems in Indexing:

An indexer analyses a text and strives to ascertain meaning. Ideally, this analysis anticipates a searcher at some future time, looking for text with the same meaning. But, meaning is not fixed at either end of this process. And even if the meaning is relatively unambiguous or stable, the terms used to represent it are not. Thus, most indexing processes encounter problems at two levels:

• Interpreting meaning as intended by the author and as construed by the potential user;
• Choosing the terms to represent that meaning that will enable this communication to be clear and as true as it can be. (Bearing in mind that such fidelity is a relative thing, to begin with)

Fidelity in the context of IR denotes the accuracy with which term(s) used to represent the name of the subject represent the meaning. A number of problems and issues associated with indexing are:

a) Subjects of documents are complex—usually multi-worded terms;

b) Users’ request for information tend to multidimensional;

c) Choice of terms—among different categories, viz. entities, activities, abstracts, properties and heterogeneous concepts (synonymous to semantic factoring);

d) Choice of word forms—among different forms, viz. noun vs. adjective, singular vs. plural;

e) Homographs—ifneglected, will give rise to reduced relevance. Seriousness o f the problem will depend on the coverage of the system.

f) Choice of the kind of vocabulary that should be used, and syntactical and other rules necessary for representing complex subjects;

g) Identification of term relationship—semantic vs. syntactic;

h) Decision about the exhaustivity level (i.e. the depth to which indexing should be done);

i) Decision about the specificity level (i.e. The levels of generality and specificity at which concepts should be represented);

j) Ensuring inter indexer consistency (i.e. consistency in indexing between several indexers), and intra-indexer consistency (i.e. consistency in indexing by the same indexer at different times); and

k) Ensuring that indexing is done not merely on the basis of a document’s intrinsic subject content but also according to the type of users who may be expected to benefit from it and the types of requests for which the document is likely to be regarded as useful.

4.7 Quality in Indexing:

The quality of an index is defined in terms of its retrieval effectiveness—the ability to retrieve what is wanted and to avoid what is not. Quality in indexing leads to a better performance in retrieving documents. The governing idea is that indexing should be neutral, objective, and independent of the particular indexer’s subjective judgment. An indexing failure on the part of the indexer may take place at the following stages of the indexing process:

➢ Failure in establishing concepts during the conceptual analysis of the content of a document;

➢ Failure to identify a topic that is of potential interest to the target user group;

➢ Misinterpretation of the content of the document, leading to the selection of inappropriate term(s);

➢ Failure in translating the result of conceptual analysis into the indexing language;

➢ Failure to use the most specific term(s) to represent the subject of the document;

➢ Use of inappropriate term(s) for the subject of a document because of the lack of subject knowledge or due to lack of seriousness on the part of the indexer; and

➢ Omission of important term(s).

The quality of indexing depends on two factors: (i) qualification and expertise of the indexer; and (ii) quality of the indexing tools. In order to achieve quality in indexing, the indexer should have adequate knowledge of the field covered by the documents s/he is indexing. S/he should understand the term of the documents as well as the rules and procedures of the specific indexing system. Quality control would be achieved more effectively if the indexers have contact with users. An indexer who has contact with the users might better be able to represent the documents in accordance with how the users think. The idea is that the indexer should attempt to determine the subject of the document taking into account the users’ questions and information needs. This might help the indexer when a document contains multiple concepts. In such a situation, the indexer can select only those concepts to represent the content of a document which is regarded as most relevant by a given community of users. Indexing quality can be tested by analysis of retrieval results, e.g. by calculating recall and precision ratios.

Indexing Consistency:

It is assumed that there is a relationship between indexing consistency and indexing quality. That is to say, an increase in consistency can be expected to cause an improvement in indexing quality. Traditionally, consistency in indexing has long been considered as an acceptable indicator of indexing quality. Consistency in indexing is essential for effective retrieval. Indexing consistency refers to “the extent to which agreement exists on the terms to be used to index some document” (Lancaster, 2003). Consistency is a measure that relates to the work of two or more indexers. It should, remain relatively stable throughout the life of a particular indexing system. Consistency is particularly important if the information is to be exchanged between agencies in a documentary network. An important factor in reaching the level of consistency is complete impartiality in the indexes. The goal of the consistency is to promote standard practice in indexing.

It has for long been observed that different indexers tend to assign different index terms to the same document as they differ considerably in their judgment as to which terms reflect the contents of the document most adequately. Essentially, indexing consistency is seen as a measure of the similarity of the reaction of different human beings processing the same information. Indexing consistency in a group of indexers is defined as the degree of agreement in the representation of the essential information content of the document by certain sets of indexing terms selected individually and independently by each of the indexers in the group.

In the process of indexing, indexers choose what topics to represent and what to call those topics. The goal is to select and name topics consistently so that all of the material about any given topic will be found together. Ideally, if two indexers use the same thesaurus or classification system to index the same document, they are supposed to assign the same index terms or class numbers. In practice, indexers are not always consistent with each other, because subject indexing is essentially a subjective process. Indexers may miss important points of the document, and add irrelevant terms. This would stem from insufficient knowledge of indexers about the subject. Decades of research on consistency between indexers and by the same indexer at different times has documented medium to high levels of inconsistency.

Article Collected From:

• Sarkhel, J. (2017). Unit-9 Basics of Subject Indexing. Retrieved from http://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/35769
• Juran Sarkhel (2017).(Professor of Library & Information Science, University of Kalyani, India)

The post Subject Indexing appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

About the University of Twente: The University of Twente is a public research technical university located in Enschede, the Netherlands. The UT collaborates with Delft University of Technology, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Wageningen University and Research Centre under the umbrella of 4TU and is also a partner in the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU).

The University has been placed in the top 500 universities in the world by five major ranking tables. The UT was ranked 65th in the Reuters’s 2017 European Most Innovative Universities, and, 184th worldwide in 2019 according to the Times Higher Education magazine.

Scholarship Program:

The University Twente Scholarship (UTS) is a scholarship for excellent students from both EU/EEA as well as non-EU/EEA countries, applying for a Master’s programme at the University of Twente.

Scholarship value: € 3,000 – € 25,000 for one year (approximately 50 scholarships available). If you have applied for a two-year programme, make sure you read the information about two-year study programs below.

The post University of Twente (Netherlands) Masters Scholarships for 2020-2021 appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Introduction: Educational Technology has emerged as a new discipline in the field of education. According to Sharma (1982), Educational Technology implies the use of all modern media, methods, materials, practices, and theories, principles for maximizing the learning by control of the environment, media and method. In a teacher-centered approach, the strategies are designed to provide the students with a highly flexible system of learning, which is geared to the individual’s life and learning styles.

Teaching styles have been undergoing various changes from time immemorial. One of those styles of teaching is e-teaching from e-content. This type of teaching brings innovative technology, removes the barrier of distance and time, and provides greater flexibility, allowing the learner to learn at his own place and pace. This also transforms ideas and information into innovation, flexible delivery and provides rapid development. In addition to that, it includes text, video, audio, animation, virtual environment, self-paced, hands-on information, etc.

1.2. Concept of Education:

Education is a process of cognitive cartography, mapping our experiences and finding a variety of reliable routes to optimal states when we find our self in non-optimal states. It is an important tool to shape human beings in the process of civilization. Humanness evolves through education. This means that education is not only a process of teaching and learning but also a social emancipation. In the words of Swami Vivekananda, “Education is manifestation of perfection already exist in man”. This goes to say that, the learner has some hidden potentiality which can be enhanced with the help of the technology module. In order to enhance the potentiality of the learner, the researcher has prepared a small piece of Multimedia courseware for teaching chemistry to improve the quality of education.

1.3 Definition:

The term education has been defined by different educationalists, philosophers, and thinkers in different ways. According to James L.Mursell, Education is the shaping of personality (1968). David W Johnson states that Education is the structuring of stations in ways that help students change, through learning in international and sometimes unintentional ways (1974). The Oxford Universal Dictionary defines education as the systematic instruction, schooling or training given to the young (and by extension, to adults) in preparation for the work of life. It is the whole course of scholastic instructions which a person, often qualified as classical, legal, medical and technical. Education is a human development effort that contributes to the cultural transformation of citizens.

According to Kishore Gandhi (1999) Education is the aggregate of all the processes by which a person develops abilities, attitudes and other forms of behaviour of positive value in the society in which he lives. The goal of education is to shape people. So that they develop integral, multifaceted personalities and are able to carry out fully their role by developing their intellectual physical and spiritual capacities and encouraging a more educated level of human feeling and aesthetic faster thus turning the ideological principle into personal connections and habits of everyday behaviour (TorstenHusen 1994).

Education is a reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate end and so far as an activity is educative, it reaches that end, the direct transformation of the quality of experience. (W.G.Reeder, 2001)

1.4 Aims of Higher Education:

According to Kothari Commission (1964-66), the following are the aims of education:

(a) To increase productivity: This is the first aim of education in our democratic setup, and it is to increase production by leaps and bounds. This increased production should match with the increasing population.
(b) To develop social and national unity: National unity is greatly essential for national reconstruction. The feeling of national unity can be developed through education only. Hence, the aims of education should be to develop social and national unity.

(c) To consolidate democracy: Education is necessary for the success of democracy. So to consolidate democracy, education should be organized well to provide more and more effective experiences for children to inculcate in them the qualities of democratic living. Only then, national consciousness will stimulate national outlook, sense of national character and responsibility.

(d) To modernize the country: The fourth aim of education is to modernize the country. This could be done by learning various kinds of scientific knowledge, together with useful techniques of production. It has to be used intelligently to boost our production bringing about the desired change in our old ideologies.

(e) To develop social, moral and spiritual values: As far as this aim is concerned human values should be inculcated in the children to enable them to become human beings.

Use reference for citation:

• Anandakrishnan, K. (2017). Development of multimedia courseware for teaching chemistry at higher secondary level. Alagappa University. http://hdl.handle.net/10603/202501
• Meenakshi, C. (2017). Awareness of dreadful diseases and environmental pollution on the personal values of the college students. Alagappa University. http://hdl.handle.net/10603/202032

The post Conceptual Framework of Education appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1.1 Introduction: The World Health Organization defines mental health ‘as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community‘ (WHO, 2013). Mental health problems refer to a wide range of difficulties, which vary in their persistence and severity. It refers to the child or young person’s symptoms and distress which are considered by a mental health professional to meet the clinical threshold for a specific mental disorder. Behavioural disorders

To live up life with full potential and effectively living a life, it should be filled with a lot of experience and willingness to do what is best for them and to the people around them, the individual should possess good mental health.

Children need to have a good mental health status if they are going to live up to their full potential and truly live a life that is filled with positive experiences and the willingness to do what is the best for themselves and the people around them.

There are numerous factors that can impact a child’s mental health status, both positively and negatively. Providing children with an environment that demonstrates love, compassion, trust, and understanding will greatly impact a child. So that they can build the stepping stones to have a productive life. Many children do not receive a proper and productive lifestyle throughout life. Some children have to deal with the childhood that is filled with anxiety, resentment, hatred, distrust, and constant negativity. They have a difficult time coping with their emotions.

Children with mental health issues will have a difficult time acclimating to different situations. Studies have shown that these children if left untreated by a mental health professional, will likely grow up and repeat these types of behaviors with their children. These children tend to have lower self-worth, negative feelings, perform poorly in school, and later become involved in unhealthy lifestyle decisions. However, when these children are properly treated they can learn how to live a more promising life. They can overcome many of the issues that affect them without their consent. These children can live happy and productive lives that are filled with love, harmony and great mental health status.

Mental health requires the development of cognitive, emotional and social skills for which educational settings make an ideal context. Educational settings promote mental health which provides children and adolescents with a sense of identity, self-respect, direction, and meaning in life, mastery, belonging, safety, social support, and participation in positive activities. Good mental health is associated with better educational and behavioral outcomes. A range of effective interventions is available to promote mental health and to prevent and reduce mental illness. However, very few children and adolescents receive such interventions in the school setting.

The behavioral outcomes of the children are associated with learning difficulties which are termed as learning difficulties, learning problems, learning disorders, etc.,

The mental illness develops much behavioral disorder among children. Behavioral disorders do not necessarily mean that a child or young person has a possible mental health problem or a Special Educational Need (SEN). Consistent disruptive or withdrawn behaviors can, however, be an indication of an underlying problem, and where there are concerns about behavior there should be an assessment to determine whether there are any causal factors such as undiagnosed learning difficulties with speech and language or mental health issues. The investigator found that there is a close affinity between disorder and learning disabilities and therefore the investigator decided to carry out the research in this conduct disorder and learning disabilities.

1.2 Behaviour:

The way in which an animal or person behaves in response to a particular situation or stimulus is called behavior.

Behaviour can be defined as the way in which an individual behaves or acts. It is the way how an individual conducts herself/himself in a social context.

Behaviour should be viewed in reference to a phenomenon, an object or a person. It can be seen in reference to societal norms, or the way in which one treats others or handles objects.

Behaviour, therefore, is the way an individual acts towards people, and society or handles the objects. It can be either bad or good. It can be normal or abnormal according to societal norms. Society will always try to correct bad behaviuor and try to bring abnormal behavior back to normal. If the child is not behaving normal, it may be due to certain disorders.

1.3 Behaviour Disorders:

Child behavior problems can crop up from anything and everything and they can be anything. It is necessary to differentiate between mischievous children and child which behavior problems. Child behavior problems can occur in toddlers as well as in teenagers. Toddler behavior problems are a bit simpler as compared to the teenage behavior problems.

Behavioral disorders, also known as disruptive behavioral disorders are the most common reasons and the parents are told to take their kids for mental health assessments and treatment. Behavioral disorders are common also in adults. If left untreated in childhood, these disorders can negatively affect a person’s ability to hold a job and maintain relationships.

1.3.1 Behaviour Disorders Concept and it Genesis:

Human behavior is ever-changing. It is dynamic and not static. The major challenge to behavior analysis lies in dealing with the complexity of human behavior, especially in an applied settings where controls are impossible, impractical or unethical. Many of the variables contributing to the complexity of behavior stem from three general sources: a) the complexity of the human repertories, b) the complexity of the environment and c) individual differences.

The term ‘behaviour’ is sometimes used in a wide sense to cover all purposive activity (Mc Dougall, 1972). It will however be confined to its narrower and more usual meaning of the individual’s response to his social environment as expressed in his bodily movement. Jahoda (1958) maintains that there are three basic aspects of mental health i.e. `criteria of normality’ as follows:

• • > Active adjustment, attempts at mastering the environment
  • > Unity of personality, stable integration of experience and
  • > Correct perception of the world and self-independent of personal needs

The individual or a person deviated from the above said normality is said to be behaviourally disordered or person’s behavior is not only strange and unusual but also annoying or upsetting than that individuals at risk of being called ‘abnormal’ or some that roughly equivalent to terms such as crazy, nuts, mentally ill, neurotic or queer (DSM- IV, 2000; Arunachalam, 2004; Arunachalam & Gopal, 2010).

Kauffman (2001) and Lam (1976) pointed out that the beginners of special education for mentally retarded and also beginners of special education for the students with behavior disorders. Since much importance was not given for the treatment of behavior disorders as mental retardation, the nineteenth century is considered as a period of ignorance and neglect regarding behavior disorders (Despert, 1965; Kanner, 1962; Rubenstein, 1948). This is clearly evident when Cole (1989) reported that during this time students with behavior disorders were sometimes confused with ‘mental defectives’ or moral imbeciles’ or ‘minor delinquents’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the umbrella term ‘maladjustment’ came into usage. But later in 1955, the Underwood Report of United Kingdom acknowledged confusion and found it necessary to stress that maladjustment should not be equated with deviant behaviour, delinquency, oddness or educational sub-normality (Ministry of Education, 1955). So students who could have been described as ‘socially deprived’, ‘disruptive’, ‘disaffected’ or ‘mentally ill’ were categorized under ‘maladjusted’. Even though an uncertainty regarding the terminology prevailed almost up to the 1970s. In the United Kingdom, the Federal Government of United States brought forward the term ‘severe emotional disturbance’ from 1977 onwards. But after the first Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) came up in 1978, the term `Emotional’ or ‘Behaviour Disorders’ came to be favoured (Nelson & Pearson, 1991). Similar problem aroused in the case of definition, which was undertaken by Bower and his colleagues. Bower (1960) adopted an empirical approach of studying the characteristics of a previously labeled group to develop criteria to guide the labeling of a non – labeled group. It was followed by Quay (1978) who led to the definition of four basic clusters of problem behavior, Researchers like Cullinan, Epstein, and Kauffman (1984) continued to add to the knowledge of the characteristics of students with behavior disorders.

Above all, Cole (1991) reported that The Council for Students with Behaviour Disorders (CCBD) in 1984 endorsed the term ‘behaviour disorder’ in the place of emotional disturbance stating with the given reasons:

• ➢ This term has far greater utility for education.
• ➢ This term is not associated exclusively with any particular theory of causation.
• ➢ The term will lead to a more comprehensive behavioural assessment that will be used in identifying such students.
• ➢ This is less stigmatizing.
• ➢ This term is a representative of a focus on educational responsibility.
• ➢ It is more descriptive, accurate and more useful to educators in identifying and planning appropriate educational placements for students.

1.3.2 Definition of Behaviour Disorders:

Behavior Disorders or BD are the conditions that are more than just disruptive behavior. They are related to mental health problems that lead to disruptive behavior, emotional and social problems. Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is an example of a behavior disorder. Children with behavior disorders typically need a variety of professional interventions including medication, psychological treatment, rehabilitation or possible other treatments.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition (DSM-IV, 1994), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition – Text Revision (DSM – IV- TR, 2000) and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders- Fifth Edition (DSM-V, 2013) defined a disorder as “an impairment or dysfunction of the individual that causes distress to the person or increased risk of death, pain, disability or loss of freedom”. In addition, this syndrome or pattern must not be merely an exactable and culturally sanctioned response to a particular event. The Tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD – 10, 2002) published by the World Health Organization, Geneva defines, “disorder as the presence of hallucinations, delusions or a limited number of severe abnormalities of behavior such as gross excitement and overactivity, marked psychomotor retardation and catatonic behavior”.

The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychology (Rom Harre & Roger Lamb, 1983) defines abnormal behavior as “the behavior resulting from stress or from a pathological condition”. Rimland (1969) defines behaviour disorder in terms of biological aspects such as “A biogenic mental disorder is a severe behavior disorder that results solely from the effects or biological factors, including both gene action and the effects of the physical-chemical environment”. Lippman (1962) defines behavior disorder in terms of psychodynamic aspects. A child suffers from emotional conflict whenever anything interferes with the satisfaction of its instructional drives and its frustration produces a state of tension”.

Definition of the National Mental Health and Special Education Coalition (1990): Emotional Disturbance is a disability characterized by behavioral or emotional responses in school which are so different from appropriate age, cultural or ethnic norms it will and affect the educational performance. Such a disability:

Is more than a temporary expected response to stressful events in the environment. It is consistently exhibited in two different settings, at least one of which is school-related.

Though the second definition was never passed, it is still the preferred definition among psychologists. Other disorders that contain classification systems Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Mood Disorders (MD).

Ross (1980) defines that the psychological disorder is said to be presented “when a child emits behavior that deviates from an arbitrary and relative social norm that occurs with a frequency of intensity that authoritative adults in the child environment judge, under the circumstances, to be either too high or too low”. Rhodes (1970) defines behavior disorder in ecological perspectives such as “emotional disturbance is a reciprocal condition which exists when intense coping responses are released within a human micro-community by a community member’s typical behavior and responses. The triggering stimulus, the rejoinder of the micro-community and the ensuing transaction are all involved in emotional disturbances”.

The above definitions have clearly shown the multi-faceted nature of behavior disorders in children and adolescents. In fact, the children and adolescents find it difficult to cope with their family, peers and school activities. It not only affects them but also others in and around them. Their easy-going nature, carelessness and irresponsible attitude without thinking the consequences of their actions not only put them into trouble but also causing enormous disturbance to others. Most of the behaviour disorders in children and adolescents are socially disapproved and harmful to social harmony. Such disorders should be taken care at the early years itself. So that the deviant behavior can be channelized into pro-social behavior. Research studies estimated that around nine percent of school children (Jayaprabha, 2003) and ten to twelve percent of high school students who are in adolescent age (Shyamala, 2004) are experiencing various types of behavior difficulties. Research studies also noted that if childhood disorders are not remediated in the early years and continue up to adolescence, they will become antisocial in nature (Didge et al., 1995). Such behaviours are definitely harmful and jeopardize not only for the individual’s life but also for the life of the community. The high incidence of behavior disorders in students and their effect on student’s academic, social, inter-remediation are to be addressed by the parents and particularly by the teachers.

1.3.3 Type of Behavioural Disorders

Similar characters of behaviour disorders are grouped together is called classification. Each group called with a unique name. People tend to classify information about important things in life and compare new events to familiar ones. A new situation is not usually treated as it was totally unique. Important similarities and differences from familiar characters are focused on grouping and classifying the behaviour disorders.

Children with behaviour disorders exhibit a spectrum of troubling behaviours. In fact, more than a hundred characteristics have been attributed to children with behaviour disorders. These children have been described as cantankerous, disruptive, lacking in social skills, disliked, rejected, generally difficult and by many other unsavory terms. Generally, such children demonstrate behaviours that do not compare favourably with those shown by normal children; behaviours that generally unacceptable to the child and to those in the environment; behaviours that are comparatively high in number and behaviours that interfere with the child’s academic and social performance.

Classification system is a systematic phenomenon. Biologists have classification systems for living organisms, chemical scientists classify the elements and physicians classify physical dysfunction. Similarly, their systems that exist to classify behavior disorders. These systems describe categories or dimensions of problem behaviours. Historically the classification of abnormal behavior focused primarily on adult disorders. Until relatively and recently there has been no extensive classification scheme for child and adolescent behavior disorder. The most widely used classification system of behavior disorders are:

• ➢ American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders (DSM)
• ➢ International Classification of Diseases (ICD) developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Geneva.
• ➢ 0-3 is a system developed to classify mental disorders of very young children (Zero to Three, 1995) by National Centre for Clinical Infant Programmes.

The DSM classification system is the dominant system in the world. The DSM is a categorical approach to classification and thus accepts a view that the difference between normal and pathological is one of kind rather than one of degree. It also says that distinctions can be made between qualitatively different types of disorders.
The DSM is an outgrowth of the Original Psychiatric Taxonomy developed by Kraepelin in 1883, from which children’s disorders have been omitted. DSM – I (1952) contained only two categories of childhood disorders: Adjustment reaction and Childhood Schizophrenia. DSM – H (1968) added the category of behavior disorders of childhood and adolescence which was subdivided into six kinds of disorders. The next two revisions, DSM – III (1980) and DSM – III R (1987) expanded appreciably the number of categories specific to children and adolescents.

In DSM – IV (1994) all disorders are classified in one of two major groups called Axis. In Axis – I, the clinician indicates any existing clinical disorder or other condition that may be a focus of treatment. Axis- II, mental retardation or a personality disorder and its presence are indicated. These two Axes represent the diagnostic categories that are the core of the DSM system. In addition to these two Axes, it is recommended that each individual be evaluated in three other arenas, and hence a fuller picture is created. Any current medical condition that is relevant to understand or treatment in the youngsters is indicated in Axis – III. Axis – IV is used to indicate any psychological or environmental problem that may affect diagnosis, treatment or prognosis. Axis – V is for reporting the clinician’s judgment of the individuals’ overall levels of functioning. The following are the major DSM-IV’s (1994), DSM -IV- TR’s (2000) and DSM-V (2013) categories described as a diagnosis in childhood or adolescence.

Mental Retardation: This disorder is characterized by significantly sub average intellectual functioning (an IQ of approximately 70 or below) with onset before age 18 years and concurrent deficits or impairments in adaptive functioning. Separate codes are provided for mental retardation and severity unspecified.

Learning Disorders: These disorders are characterized by academic functioning that is substantially below that is expected, given to the person’s chronological age, measured intelligence and age appropriative education. The specific disorders included in this section are reading disorder, mathematical disorder, disorder of written expression and learning disorder not otherwise specified.

Motor Skills Disorders: This includes developmental co-ordination disorder, which is characterized by motor co-ordination that is substantially below the expected, given to the person’s chronological age and measured intelligence.

Communication Disorders: These disorders are characterized by difficulties in speech or language and include expressive language disorder, mixed receptive and expressive language disorder, phonological disorder, stuttering and communication disorder not otherwise specified.

Pervasive Developmental Disorders: These disorders are characterized by severe deficits and pervasive impairment in multiple areas of development. These include impairment in reciprocal social interaction, impairment in communication and the presence of stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities. The specific disorders included in this section are: Autistic disorder, Rett’s disorder, Childhood disintegrative disorder, Asperger’s disorder and Pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.

Attention Deficit and Disruptive Behaviour Disorders: This section includes attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder, which is characterized by prominent symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity. Sub types are provided for specifying the predominant symptom presentation: Predominantly inattentive type, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type and the combined type.

Also included in this section are the disruptive behavior disorders: Conduct disorder is characterized by a pattern of behavior that violates the basic rights or others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules: Oppositional defiant disorder is characterized by a pattern of negativistic hostile and defiant behavior.

This section also included attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder not otherwise specified disruptive behavior disorder.

Feeding and Eating Disorders: These disorders are characterized by persistent disturbances in feeding and eating. The specific disorders included are pica, rumination, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa disorder.

TIC Disorders: These disorders are characterized by vocal and/or motor tics. The specific disorders included are Tourette’s disorder, Chronic motor or vocal tic disorder, Transient tic disorder and Tic disorder not otherwise specified.

Elimination Disorders: This grouping included encopresis the repeated passage of faces into inappropriate places and enuresis, the repeated voiding of urine into inappropriate places.

Other Disorders of Infancy, Childhood or Adolescence: This grouping is for disorders that are not covered in the sections listed above.

➢ Separation anxiety disorder: It is developmentally inappropriate and excessive anxiety, concerning separation from home or from those to whom the child is attached.

➢ Selective mustim: It is a consistent failure to specific social situation despite speaking in other situations.

➢ Reactive attachment disorder: It is markedly disrupted and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness that occur in most contexts and is associated with grossly pathogenic care.

➢ Stereotypic movement disorder: It is repetitive, seemingly driven and interferes with normal actives and at times may result in bodily injury.

Personality Disorders: It is an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time and leads to distress or impairment. The personality disorders included in this section are listed below: Paranoid personality disorder: It is a pattern of distrust and suspiciousness.

Schizoid personality disorder: It is a pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotional expression.

➢ Schizotypal personality disorder: It is a pattern of acute discomfort in close relationships, cognitive in perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior.

➢ Antisocial personality disorder: It is a pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.

➢ Borderline personality disorder: It is a pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects and marked impulsivity.

➢ Histrionic personality disorder: It is a pattern of excessive emotional and attention-seeking.

➢ Narcissistic personality disorder: It is a pattern of grand, need for admiration and lack of empathy

➢ Avoidant personality disorder: It is a pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy and hypersensitivity of negative evaluation

➢ Dependent personality disorder: It is a pattern of submissive and clinging behavior released to an excessive need to be taken care of

➢ Obsessive-Compulsive personality disorder: It is a pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and control

According to the DSM – V (2013) one more type is included i.e. Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD): children with extreme behavioral dyscontrol but non-episodic irritability no longer qualify for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

The common disorder among children is Disruptive Behavior Disorder which can be identified and minimized by controlling the external factors by their parents and teachers. So the investigator proceeds the disruptive behavior disorder since the present investigation is based on conduct disorder.

Use reference for citation:

• Jawahar, P. (2016). Co Morbidity of conduct disorders and learning disabilities of upper primary children in relation to academic performance. Alagappa University. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/201864

The post Behavioural disorders: meaning and types appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Learning disability arises from neurological differences in brain structure and its functions. It affects a person’s ability to receive, store, process, retrieve or communicate information. While the specific nature of these brain-based disorders is still not well understood, considerable progress has been made in mapping some of the characteristic difficulties of LD to specific brain regions and structures. Progress has also been made in understanding the interface between genetics and LD, with documentation of LD, ADHD and related disorders occurring with considerable frequency within members of the same families (e.g. parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, cousins). Learning disabilities may also be a consequence of insults to the developing brain before or during birth, drug or alcohol use during pregnancy, maternal malnutrition, low birth weight, oxygen deprivation, and premature or prolonged labor. Postnatal events resulting in LD might include traumatic injuries, severe nutritional deprivation or exposure to poisonous substances such as lead.

However, there is a higher reported incidence of learning disabilities among people living in poverty, perhaps due to increased risk of exposure to poor nutrition, ingested and environmental toxins (e.g., lead, tobacco, and alcohol) and other risk factors during early and critical stages of development. Learning disabilities are both real and permanent. Many individuals with LD suffer from low self-esteem, set low expectations for them, struggle with underachievement and underemployment, have few friends and, with greater frequency than their non-LD peers, appear to end up in trouble with the law.

Early recognition that children may be at risk for LD can prevent years of struggle and self-doubt. As they grow older, learning about the specific nature of their LD, accepting that LD is not who they are but what they have and orchestrating the types of services, accommodations and supports they need to be successful will help them overcome barriers to learning and become independent, self-confident and contributing members of society.

1.1 Classification of Learning Disabilities:

In the area of LD, classification occurs at multiple levels: in identifying children as LD or typically achieving; as LD versus mentally deficient; within LD, as reading versus math impaired. Across classes of putative childhood conditions that produce underachievement, LD is identified as a particular type of “unexpected” low achievement and is distinguished from types where low achievement is expected due to emotional disturbance, social or cultural disadvantage, or inadequate instruction (Kavale & Forness, 2000).

From a classification perspective, these levels of classification and the notion of LD as a form of low achievement that is unexpected represent hypotheses that should be evaluated. There are multiple underlying classifications of LD that are essentially hypotheses that have not been consistently recognized. When the criteria for identifying LD began to evolve into policy in the 1960s, there was little research on which to base the underlying classification and resultant definitions. This situation has gradually changed over the past 30 years, but the research that has emerged has had little impact on policy at the federal, state and local levels. Indeed, the persistence of common assumptions about LD, its classification and the perpetuation of resultant identification procedures are surprising given, what has been learned about these disorders (Lyon et al., 2003). As we turn to research on the classification of LD, the question of how classifications should change as knowledge advances will emerge as a challenge to the field.

1.2 Definition of Learning Disabilities:

Learning Disability (LD) is a general term that describes specific kinds of learning problems. A learning disability can cause a person to have trouble learning and using certain skills. The skills most often affected are reading, writing, listening, speaking, reasoning, and doing math. Learning disabilities vary from person to person. One person with LD may not have the same kind of learning problems as another person with LD may have problems understanding math. Still another person may have trouble in each of these areas, as well as with understanding what people are saying (National Dissemination Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities, 2004).

LD is a group of disorders that affects people’s ability to either interpret what they see and hear or to link information from different parts of the brain. These limitations can show up in many ways: as specific difficulties with spoken and written language, coordination, self-control, or attention. Such difficulties extend to schoolwork and can impede learning to read, write, or do math.

A learning disability is a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to receive, process, store and respond to information. The term learning disability is used to describe the seemingly unexplained difficulty of a person of at least average intelligence who has been in acquiring basic academic skills. These skills are essential for success at school and at work and for coping with life in general. LD does not stand for a single disorder. It is a term that refers to a group of disorders.

Interestingly, there is no clear and widely accepted definition of learning disabilities. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of the field, there is an ongoing debate on the issue of definition and currently, at least twelve definitions appear in the professional literature. There are several technical definitions offered by various health and education sources. Overall, most experts agree on the following descriptions:

• • ➢ Individuals with LD have difficulties with academic achievement and progress
  • ➢ Discrepancies exist between a person’s potential for learning and what that person actually learns
  • ➢ Individuals with LD show an uneven pattern of development (language development, physical development, academic development, and/or perceptual development)
  • ➢ Learning problems are not due to environmental disadvantage
  • ➢ Learning problems are not due to mental retardation or emotional disturbance
  • ➢ Learning disabilities can affect one’s ability to read, write, speak, spell, compute math and reason. They also can affect a person’s attention, memory, coordination, social skills, and emotional maturity
  • ➢ Individuals with LD have normal intelligence, or sometimes even intellectually gi feted
  • ➢ Individuals with LD have differing capabilities, with difficulties in certain academic areas but not in others
  • ➢ Learning disabilities have an effect on either input (the brain’s ability to process incoming information) or output (the person’s ability to use information in practical skills, such as reading, math, spelling, etc.)

Research suggests that learning disabilities are caused by differences in how a person’s brain works and how it processes information.

1.3 Signs and Symptoms of Learning Disabilities:

Learning disabilities look very different from one child to another. One child may struggle with reading and spelling, while another loves books but can’t understand math. Still another child may have difficulty in understanding what others are saying or communicating out loud. The problems are very different, but they all have learning disorders.

It is not always easy to identify learning disabilities. Because of the wide variations, there is no single symptom or profile that anyone can look to as proof of a problem. However, some warning signs are more common than others at different ages. If one is aware of what he/she is, he/she’ll be able to catch a learning disorder early and quickly take steps to get his/her child’s help.

The following checklist lists some common red flags for learning disorders. Remember that children who don’t have learning disabilities may still experience some of these difficulties at various times. The time for concern is when there is a consistent unevenness in one’s child’s ability to master certain skills.

Preschool signs and symptoms of learning disabilities

• • ➢ Problems pronouncing words
  • ➢ Trouble finding the right word
  • ➢ Difficulty rhyming
  • ➢ Trouble learning the alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes, days of the week
  • ➢ Difficulty following directions or learning routines
  • ➢ Difficulty controlling crayons, pencils, and scissors, or coloring within the lines
  • ➢ Trouble with buttons, zippers, snaps, learning to tie shoes

1.4 Types of Learning Disabilities:

Learning disabilities are often grouped by school-area skill set. If your child is in school, the types of learning disorders that are most conspicuous usually revolve around reading, writing or math.

i) Learning Disability in Reading (Dyslexia):

Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that can cause problems with reading, writing, and spelling. It’s a “specific learning difficulty”, which means it causes problems with certain abilities used for learning, such as reading and writing. Unlike a learning disability, intelligence is not affected. It’s estimated that up to one in every 10 to 20 people in the UK has some degree of dyslexia. Dyslexia is a lifelong problem that can present challenges on a daily basis, but support is available to improve reading and writing skills and help those with the problem are successful at school and at work.

There are two types of learning disabilities in reading. Basic reading problems occur when there is difficulty in understanding the relationship between sounds, letters, and words. Reading comprehension problems occur when there is an inability to grasp the meaning of words, phrases, and paragraphs.

Signs of reading difficulty include problems with:

• • • ➢ Letter and word recognition
    • ➢ Understanding words and ideas
    • ➢ Reading speed and fluency
    • ➢ General vocabulary skills

ii) Learning Disability in Math (Dyscalculia):

Dyscalculia is a specific learning disability (or difficulty) in mathematics. It was originally defined by the Czechoslovakia researcher Kose, as a difficulty in mathematics as a result of impairment to particular parts of the brain involved in mathematical cognition, but without a general difficulty in cognitive function.

Dyscalculia or mathematical learning disabilities is a specific learning disability that affects around 6% of the population. Individuals with dyscalculia are not unintelligent, but struggle to learn mathematics, despite having an adequate learning environment at home and at school. Dyscalculia is assumed to be due to a difference in brain function.

Learning disabilities in math vary greatly depending on the child’s other strengths and weaknesses. A child’s ability to do math will be affected differently by a language learning disability, or a visual disorder or a difficulty with sequencing, memory or organization.

A child with a math-based learning disorder may struggle with memorization and organization of numbers, operation signs, and number facts (like 5+5=10) or (5*5=25). Children with math learning disorders might also have trouble with counting principles (such as counting by twos or counting by fives) or have difficulty telling time.

iii) Learning Disability in Writing (Dysgraphia):

Dysgraphia can appear as difficulties with spelling, poor handwriting and trouble putting thoughts on paper. Dysgraphia can be a language-based, and/or non-language based disorder.

Many people have poor handwriting, but dysgraphia is more serious. Dysgraphia is a neurological disorder that generally appears when children are first learning to write. Experts are not sure what causes it, but early treatment can help prevent or reduce problems.

Learning disabilities in writing can involve the physical act of writing or the mental activity of comprehending and synthesizing information. Basic writing disorder refers to physical difficulty in forming words and letters. Expressive writing disability indicates a struggle to organize thoughts on paper.

Symptoms of a written language learning disability revolve around the act of writing. They include problems with:

• • • ➢ Neatness and consistency of writing
    • ➢ Accurately copying letters and words
    • ➢ Spelling consistency
    • ➢ Writing organization and coherence

iv) Other Types of Learning Disabilities and Disorders:

Reading, writing, and math aren’t the only skills impacted by learning disorders. Other types of learning disabilities involve difficulties with motor skills (movement and coordination), understanding spoken language, distinguishing between sounds and interpreting visual information.

v) Learning Disability in Motor Skills (Dyspraxia):

Motor difficulty refers to problems with movement and coordination whether it is with fine motor skills (cutting, writing) or gross skills (running, jumping). A motor disability is sometimes referred to as an “output” activity meaning that it relates to the output of information from the brain. In order to run, jump, write or cut something, the brain must be able to communicate with the necessary limbs to complete the action.

Signs that the child might have a motor coordination disability include problems with physical abilities that require hand-eye coordination, like holding a pencil or buttoning a shirt.

vi) Learning Disability in Language (Aphasia/Dysphasia):

Language and communication learning disabilities involve the ability to understand or produce spoken language. Language is also considered an output activity because it requires organizing thoughts in the brain and calling upon the right words to verbally explain something or communicate with someone else.

Signs of a language-based learning disorder involve problems with verbal language skills, such as the ability to retell a story and the fluency of speech, as well as the ability to understand the meaning of words, parts of speech, directions, etc.

vii) Auditory and Visual Processing Problems: The Importance of the Ears and Eyes

The eyes and the ears are the primary means of delivering information to the brain, a process sometimes called “input.” If either the eyes or the ears aren’t working properly then leaning can be affected.

Auditory Processing Disorder – Professionals may refer to the ability to hear well as “auditory processing skills” or “receptive language.” The ability to hear things correctly greatly impacts the ability to read, write and spell. An inability to distinguish subtle differences in sound or hearing sounds at the wrong speed makes it difficult to sound out words and understand the basic concepts of reading and writing.

Visual Processing Disorder- Problems in visual perception include missing subtle differences in shapes, reversing letters or numbers, skipping words, skipping lines, misperceiving depth or distance, or having problems with eye-hand coordination. Professionals may refer to the work of the eyes as “visual processing.” Visual perception can affect gross and fine motor skills, reading comprehension, and math.

1.5 Impact of Learning Disabilities on Students:

The impact of learning disabilities of students is leading to:

Increased grade retention: Large performance gaps exist between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers. It is also noted that students with disabilities continue to be retained much more often than the general population which is more than the one-third are retained at grade level at least once, usually in elementary school. Promotion tests-the fastest growing area of high-stakes testing-will most likely contribute to even more retention of students with learning disabilities, despite the fact that retention has been shown to be an ineffective intervention to improving academic achievement. More importantly, students who are retained are much more likely to drop out later in school, and those retained more than once are dramatically more likely to drop out. Researchers on retention show that grade repeaters as adults are more likely to be unemployed, living on public assistance, or in prison than adults who did not repeat a grade.

Increased possibility of dropping out: Data show that students with disabilities fail large-scale tests at higher rates than other students, especially in the years immediately following the introduction of such tests. One important reason for this is their lack of access to the curriculum on which the tests are based. Failing a high-stakes test, such as a test required for graduation with a standard diploma, can increase the likelihood that low achievers will drop out of school. We already know that nearly 30 percent of students with learning disabilities drop out of school (compared to 11% of the general student population), and we know that dropping out of school is associated with poor life outcomes in regard to postsecondary education and employment. Some students with disabilities may even be encouraged to leave school and pursue alternative routes such as the General Education Development (GED) exam. Such students are known as “push outs.” Fortunately, the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to show improved high school graduation rates, a requirement that will help to prevent such activity.

Awarding of alternative high school diplomas or certificates: To compensate students with disabilities who fail high school graduation tests, many states are developing one or more alternative diplomas and certificates. These include nonstandard diplomas such as IEP diplomas, certificates of completion, certificates of attendance, and modified diplomas. There is little research on the value of such alternative diplomas and certificates. Many may not be accepted by colleges and universities. Meanwhile, the existence of such alternatives provides the opportunity for students with learning disabilities to be ‘tracked” into high school course work that will not provide the necessary credits for a standard diploma, nor provide the student access to the subject matter of gradation tests. Parents need to be well informed regarding the implications of any nonstandard diplomas and should be sure that they are involved in decisions regarding the high school diploma track of their students with LD.

Use reference for citation:

• Jawahar, P. (2016). Co Morbidity of conduct disorders and learning disabilities of upper primary children in relation to academic performance. Alagappa University. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/201864

The post Learning Disabilities appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

1.1. Introduction: World Wide Web (WWW) ^[1] is a huge source of interlinked documents that forms a very useful information source. The success of WWW is largely due to its decentralized design structure ^[2] where the information is hosted by several servers, and a document can point to other documents irrespective of its geographic location. An information retrieval ^{[3, 4]} is a technique for searching the information about a subject over an enormous number of resources relevant to the user’s information need. Information retrieval can be precisely defined as: Search Engine

“Information Retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need from within large collections (usually stored on computers)” ^[4].

WWW has revolutionized the means of data availability. But due to its current structure ^[5] it’s getting difficult to access the relevant information from such a large collection. The Web site has grown to a large extent and due to the large volume of available information; it is becoming difficult to locate useful information ^{[2, 6]}. Retrieving the relevant information from WWW is an unprecedentedly difficult task.

With such a large collection of information, search engines ^[7] are emerging as an important tool for searching the relevant information. The information is searched through a search engine by submitting queries that are in the form of keywords and as a result information seekers find the required information. Thus, search engines are considered as an important tool for information retrieval system that returns a set of ranked web pages according to their relevance and matches the query keywords.

1.2 Search Engines:

Search Engine is a tool that is used to retrieve the information stored over the WWW. Typically Search Engine has the following main components:

1.2.1 Crawling: It is the first stage of search engine in which the documents from the web are downloaded based on the URL received from the URL Frontier Queue [8]. The web pages fetched from the web are sent for parsing, for further extraction of links. The extracted links are sent to URL Frontier Queuefor fetching of web pages from those links after passing through a series of tests of duplicate contents and URL elimination.

1.2.2 Indexing: The crawled web pages are then indexed by the Indexer Module. The major steps involved in index construction are -Tokenization, linguistic pre-processing process such as hyphenation, stop word removal, stemming, lemmatization, normalization [4]. These terms are sorted and maintained as a posting list consisting of the frequency of the terms and the document that each term occurs in. Different types of indexes are constructed depending upon the type of contents; Text Index, Structure Index, Utility Index [7].

1.2.3 Searching: Query terms entered by the user are compared with the index, producing the results. When a user query is entered, the terms of the query are matched with the terms in the index structure and the terms matching the query terms are returned as a result to the user.

1.2.4 Ranking: The web pages returned after matching with a query are ranked based on various factors. The most widely used ranking algorithms are Page-Rank and Hypertext Induced Topic Specific (HITS) algorithm.

The search engines, for example, Google, Yahoo, etc. match the keywords in the query with the web pages that are having those keywords, resulting into a result page set which has relevant and irrelevant results. Retrieving the relevant information from the information available is an important research issue in search engines.

1.3 Limitations of the traditional search engines:

Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo works on keyword-based matching [9]. It is the user’s work to extract out the relevant information from a large set of results. Finding out the relevant information from such a large set of web pages proves out to be a very tedious task. Search engines based on keyword matching have certain problems associated with them [10, 11, 12, 13, 14] as listed below:

1. High recall, low precision:

The main issue with the returned results is that they have high recall but low precision which means that it returns a lot of important results from its repository but those results are not that relevant which refers to low precision. But with a lot of results retrieved is that even if the main relevant pages are retrieved, they are of little use if large numbers of mildly relevant or irrelevant documents are also retrieved.

2. Low or no Recall:

Often it happens that users don’t get any relevant answer for request, or important and relevant pages are not retrieved.

3. Lack of machine Understandability:

The machine has the inability to understand the provided information due to a lack of universal format [15]. The information is based on HTML based free format web pages which are very suitable for direct human use but are not appropriate for automated information exchange, retrieval, and processing by software agents(machines). The current web contents are mostly represented in HTML which is more presentation language and henceforth, does not help in machine interpretability.

4. Poor Content Aggregation:

For the query entered the results are a lot of documents or web pages; a user has to manually aggregate the partial information to get the complete information. Hence, search engines return a lot of results which has to be manually aggregated.

5. No Semantics:

Results are based on just matching the keyword in that document. There is no concept based matching of the query with the documents. Therefore, the results may or may not be relevant in the context of semantic to the user query.

6. Difficulty in handling queries with dis-ambiguous terms.:

The current search engines match the query keywords with the keywords present in the document. For example query, “jaguar” has two different meaning cars as well as animals and hence, produces results for both the documents, leading to low precision. Similarly, the query “holiday “and “vacation” relate to the same term but when entered separately produces a different set of results although referring to the same word.

The limitations specified above mentions that just matching keywords do not help in searching; it produces a lot of imprecise results. The efficient searching requires the machine to understand the semantics of the information. This machine understandability concept can help WWW to make a move from the syntactic web [16] to Semantic Web [16, 17].

For citation use reference:

• Dhingra, V. (2016). SEARCH SYSTEM FOR ONTOLOGY. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/209994

The post Basics of Search Engine appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.

Access Point:

Each bibliographic record is given one or more access points through which the record can be retrieved. For a cataloging record, an access point is presented in the form of a heading added to the description. Each heading applied to a record then results in a catalog entry. The basis for the access point may be the subject content of the work. In this case, it is called a subject entry and the heading used is called a subject heading (to be discussed in Part Three). Or the basis for the access point may be a bibliographic identifier, such as the author or the title of the work. This kind of access point is determined by descriptive cataloging rules. The four types of bibliographic entry found in a catalog are:

1. Names of persons who perform certain functions:

        a. Authors

        b. Editors and compilers

        c. Translators

        d. Illustrators

       e. Other related persons (e.g., the addressee of a collection of letters; a person honored by a Festschrift)

2. Names of corporate bodies related to the item being described in a function other than solely as distributor or manufacturer

3. Titles

4. Series

Sometimes the heading is in the form of a name-title combination.

The post Cataloguing Access Point appeared first on Library & Information Science Network.