The present study was undertaken to investigate the concerns of secondary school teacher-librarians, that the subject headings set down by the Australian Schools Catalogue Information Service (ASCIS) do not cover topics in senior sourses of study. NSW HSC Economics was chosen to test this perception.
Terms were extracted from three textual sources (syllabus, textbook and examination papers) and checked against the subject headings in the ASCIS Subject Headings List. A comparison was made between terms which matched exactly, those which were only partially matched and those which had no match. The linguistic complexity of the term (single-word or multi-word) and the number of textual sources using the term were also taken into account.
The results showed a varying degree of match between textual terms and subject headings. Single-word terms found in more than one textual source were much more likely to be found in the subject headings than those from only one textual source. Multi-word terms were found less frequently than single-word terms, but were also more likely to be found when they came from more than one textual source. There was a large number of partial matches in this group, and these were found to be more general in concept than the textual terms.
Most of the terms were found, but the general nature of the partial matches and the lack of adequate cross references may cause problems in subject analysis and retrieval.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218605 |
| Date | January 1989 |
| Creators | Sorby, Janet, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Communication |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Janet Sorby |
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