Music Literature Indexing: Comparing Users' Free-Text Queries and Controlled Vocabularies |
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| Authors: | Shuheng Wu Yun Fan |
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| Institution: | 1. Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York, Queens, New York;2. The International Center, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York |
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| Abstract: | This study examined the characteristics of users' free-text queries submitted to RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (a music literature database), and compared those queries with the controlled vocabularies used by RILM. Search-log analysis identified 11 categories of user-created search terms, and mapped each user-created search term to RILM's index terms, assessing whether it was a perfect match, a partial match, or no match. Only 30.04% of the user-created search terms did not match RILM's index terms. Most of the partial-matching and non-matching user-created search terms were personal names, work titles, and topical terms. Suggestions are offered to enhance RILM's controlled vocabularies. |
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| Keywords: | Music literature indexing controlled vocabulary thesaurus user queries RILM Abstracts of Music Literature search-log analysis authority file |
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