ASSIGNMENT 5: CONTROLLED VOCABULARY INDEXING
10% graded Due Monday, April 16 by noon in Dr. Miksa's GSLIS mailbox.

This assignment is to be completed individually by students rather than by student teams.

Index the following article as an item in a database, using controlled vocabulary:

John Heilemann, "The Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: The Untold Story of the Microsoft Antitrust Case" Wired 8 (no. 11, Nov. 2000): 261-311.

Use descriptors from the UNESCO Thesaurus, which is found online at:

http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/index.htm

1. Without consulting any kind of controlled vocabulary list or thesaurus, go through the article and list keywords representing concepts from the article that reflect in your opinion its most important subject areas. These key words may be subject concepts but will also include proper names of persons, companies, and agencies. You may use language which you find in the article and in that respect, you will find that the natural language indexing which you already have accomplished in the back-of-the-book indexing assignment to be of some help. However, you are not restricted to natural language, and where applicable, list subject concepts in your own words. It may well be that a single term would easily or conveniently cover several natural language terms. You might have as many as 15-20 keywords.

2. Match your topical keywords as closely as possible to the UNESCO Thesaurus for subject concepts. Sometimes the descriptors in the thesaurus will be more general than the keywords you identified, and, indeed, in other instances you may not find a descriptor that matches one or another of your keywords.

3. Select the most important proper names (of persons, companies, agencies) from the article to be included and put them in CV formÑthat is, invert them so that each personÕs last name comes first. Proper names may be listed as long as they can be tied to descriptors as NTs (narrower terms). For example, "Lawyers" is a descriptor, so specific lawyers may be included. [Do not use the name of the author of the article as a descriptor unless it is quite obvious that the article is also "about" him.]

4. Now, from steps 2 and 3 above, select the 7-10 descriptors (both subject terms from the UNESCO Thesaurus and proper names) that best represent the main ideas in the article and that index different aspects of the article. [Another way to state this is that you should rank all the descriptors and then select the top seven descriptor candidates.] In other words, select the 7-10 descriptors from among your larger list that give the best access to the entire article. [The reason for beginning with a larger list of descriptors and then choosing 7-10 is that you may well find descriptors which you cannot convert to the Thesaurus vocabulary and thus cannot be used in your final list.]

5. Among these 7-10 descriptors, indicate which descriptors are major (most comprehensive) and which are minor (not covering the entire article). You could do this by some kind of key symbol, or by bold-facing the major descriptors. You must have both categories of descriptors represented.

6. Write no more than a single page (double spaced) commentary in which you reflect on the process you went through to select the descriptors, difficulties you encountered, etc.

7. Hand in:

• Title page giving your name, the assignment number, the name of the assignment, the class, and the date.
• The larger initial list of keywords (no more than 20) which list subject concepts, names, etc., in your own words.
• The second list of descriptors that have been converted to thesaurus and CV form.
• The third, smaller, final list of 7-10 formalized descriptors, including proper names that fit within the thesaurus terminology, that represent your final selection. Designate descriptors as major or minor.
• A one page commentary on the assignment. Staple these together in the foregoing order.

8. Due by noon on Monday, April 16 in Dr. Miksa's GSLIS office box.