1. Indexing: Automatic vs. Automated Corina Galvan LS5813 Fall 2009

2. Introduction After reviewing the “conceptual cleanup” survey that our class took, it appeared that only 34% of our class stated that they completely understood this concept . So I chose to review this concept for the other 66% of our class that are almost there but not quite.

3. Indexing According to Chu (2003) indexing uses terms, either derived or assigned, to represent information facets of the original document. What does that exactly mean? Words or phrases are used to represent the information in a document when searched for. Ex: A document about the life cycle of a butterfly could be indexed with butterfly, life cycle.

4. Indexing Indexing activities can be categorized into two types: intellectual and mechanical. Intellectual indexing is performed by a person, e.g. assigning terms, controlled vocabularies. Mechanical indexing is performed by a machine., e.g. alphabetizing and formatting. This is where automatic and automated indexing comes in.

5. Automatic vs. Automated Automated indexing is the combined efforts of human and machine. A person would perform the intellectual portion of the indexing and a machine will perform the mechanical portion. Automatic indexing is where the intellectual and mechanical potion of the indexing is completely performed by a machine. This is also known as machine indexing. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to using wither method and that will explored in the next few slides.

6. Automatic vs. Automated Intellectual Indexing: Automated indexing as mentioned before relies on the human indexer and in this case it is slightly superior to automatic indexing. According to Chu(2003) computers can only deal with intellectual indexing as well as a human indexer and sometimes much worse, because it does not have the analytical power to think like a human being. So the outcome of the intellectual indexing may not be as good as the indexing conducted by a human indexer.

7. Automatic vs. Automated Time/Cost efficiency: The time is take to complete an index is greatly reduced with the use of mechanical indexing. Automatic is more time efficient than automated but automated does greatly benefit from mechanical indexing. By allowing the mechanical aspect of the indexing to be completed by q machine, it allows the human indexer to focus more on the intellectual aspect of the indexing. The time efficiency of the indexing correlates to the cost efficiency of the indexing. A Chu (2003) stated, automatic indexing appears to be an attractive solution to the high cost associated with manual indexing.

8. Automatic vs. Automated Consistency: This is where automatic has an edge over automated. A machine has the ability to be consistent with its indexing as opposed to a human indexer, because what one human indexer may think can differ from another. By standardizing it with a machine it would eliminate that problem.

9. Works Chu, H. (2003). Information representation and retrieval in the digital age. Medford, NJ: American Society for Information Science and Technology. Clip Art from Microsoft Office 2007 Clip Art