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LIS 663 Basic Database Searching
Using controlled vocabulary and database thesauri. Index browsing, term mapping
and clustering
Session 3.
Péter JacsóFall 2015
Jacsó
• Inherited from the limits of the card catalog & print world
• Organization by documents classification codes and subject headings
• Space, time & cost limits and tree saving of the print era
• Only human indexing limit in the digital era
• Human indexing vs. automatic indexing
Jacsó
• The unsung horrors of uncontrolled vocabularies for
AU, JN, CS, DT, LA, CY data elements
• The good the bad and the ugly of controlled subject vocabularies
• The appealing and appalling software tools for Controlled vocabulary searching
Jacsó
• The indifference and incompetence of staff at datafile producers
• Here today gone tomorrow for $0.50 more
• The myth and reality of looking up controlled vocabulary terms
• The convenience and ease of free-text search in TI, DE, AB
• I teach and preach but you decide
• Not looking up AU, JN is reckless negligence, malpractice
• You MUST browse
• Nice idea - brutal reality
• Increase recall OR precision?
• Increase recall AND precision idea
• Garden of synonyms as descriptors
• Learn to love synonyms, but mind implications
Jacsó
• Whose thesaurus is it, anyway
• How many Englishes there are
• Chances of guessing, agony of look-up
• Convenience governs the search
• Descriptor changes across time in single database
• Cross-database searching nightmare
Jacsó
European Education Thesaurus (what about the Brits?)
Pupils and students have behaviour, but students' have no attitudes in Europe?
Jacsó
• Same flavor of English no panacea
• APAIS - domestic violence
• ATED - family violence
• BEI - family violence
• Whitaker - domestic violence
• CBCA - family violence
• Canadian News - family v & domestic v
• PsycINFO - family violence
• e-psyche - domestic abuse (lead-in)Jacsó
• LCSH - conjugal violence
• Gale - conjugal violence
• PAIS (all but DIALOG) - spousal abuse
• PAIS (DIALOG) –still no spousal abuse
• This is user abuse by thesaurus
Jacsó
• The Myth of Cross References
• Few lead-in terms
• Marcia Bates' side-of-the-barn principle
• Keep dreaming, but …
• PubMed UMLS MetaThesaurus
• My plea to include (invisibly) the common misspelled variants
Jacsó
Look up but don’t search by thesaurus terms alone
Jacsó
• By now you know that
- Not all thesauri are born equal
- Not all implementations of the same thesaurus
are born equal
• National anthem
- Same tune, same lyrics
- Delivery by Whitney Houston vs. Roseanne Barr
People do not use thesaurus unless they must
Jacsó
• Extra step
• "Good enough without it" attitude
• Archaic, stale content, uneasy ESL structure
• Aging crooner at retirement home party
• Very few are Tina Turners
• Less then 10 percent of databases have thesaurus
implemented on DIALOG, Ovid, OCLC, ProQuest
Jacsó
• You can tell the horse that there are rivers
• You can tell the horse to go to the river
• You can spur the horse to go to the river
• You can lure the horse to the river
But will it drink the water?
Will it like the muddy and stale water?
How to lure in end users to use CV
Jacsó
• Bring the water from the river to the horse
But the water still may be muddy and/or
lukewarm
• Mapping users' terms automatically into
thesaurus terms
• Once again, it depends on who does the delivery
Excuses
Jacsó
• Attitude remained the same
• I wanna search not browse
• Real men don't ask for directions
• They just drive around the block as if for fun
• Give up finding the gourmet restaurant and go to BK
• Only hope: even the “machoest” machos look at road
signs
• Use term mapping (but call it term translation when
talking to male patron)
but you can't count on consistency for British terms to directly mapping into MeSH (it is a MeSH deficiency, not sw)
Jacsó
Is sciatica a really equivalent term to ischialgia? Look at the scope note. It does not appear as synonym, but its definition seems real good match
Jacsó