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Jennifer Wilson, Data and Taxonomy Manager at BBC Scotland, traces the history of the BBC Scotland archive as it has grown from a card catalogue to a sophisticated desktop search facility, from the days (not so long ago) when handling archive content was very much the librarians' business to today when those librarians, now known as media managers, have the responsibility for deciding what gets archived, in accordance with established policies, and for professional management of the archive, but where the production community, the users, have a much more hands-on involvement, more do-it-yourself than ever before. She asks whether users' unwillingness to go beyond Google-type free searching really matters, and the implications for Media Management Scotland's careful approach to cataloguing and indexing. She points to the need for the media managers to understand user requirements if they are to do their job effectively. And she reminds us that media managers do not call the tune -- how they do their job has to reflect the object and purpose as defined by the client. The growing focus of Media Management Scotland's work these days is to enable the BBC to deliver value for money via reuse and re-versioning its material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the course of a doctoral research project aiming to updating the know-how and skills archivists require to index archival collections according to themes, the author examined subject indexation from the perspective of those persons who create access, that is, the archivists. The content and the quality of the indexes are the result of the work of the archivist. This article outlines the specificity of subject indexation in archival science. To achieve this, the characteristics of subject indexation in archival and library sciences were gleaned from the literature. The areas of similarity and of divergence regarding indexation, the organisational principals and the descriptive techniques of both disciplines were examined. The idea under consideration is whether the archivists can apply the guidelines used for indexation in libraries without changing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the treatment of family papers in a sample of specialist repositories in the UK. It is suggested that there is an inherent tension between thematic collecting policies and traditional archival theories concerning the preservation of provenance. This conflict has sometimes been more broadly characterized in archival thought as the choice between serving the needs of users and that of fulfilling archival requirements. Family papers can serve to highlight these difficulties, due to their often complex provenance and wide-ranging content. It is argued that, through arrangement and description, archivists have sometimes simplified and, in some cases, distorted information about records in their care in order to meet the perceived interests of their users. It is concluded that authority records, if properly developed, could protect provenance, enable easier access and minimize the privileging of information within multifaceted collections such as family papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little attention has previously been paid to the use of controlled vocabularies and subject keywords for indexing archival finding aids in the UK. Qualitative and quantitative responses to a questionnaire of UK repositories concerning the use of subject keywords and controlled vocabularies are presented. Clear patterns of thesaurus usage emerge from responses, and diverse opinions are put forward. Issues raised include retrieval by free text versus controlled vocabulary, strengths and weaknesses of different thesauri, lack of suitable thesauri, use of multiple thesauri, retrospective conversion, consistency of indexing across repositories and consistency of indexing across networks. Possible ways forward for the subject indexing of finding aids are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indexing policy must not be considered as a list of procedures to be followed, but a philosophy that reflects the interests and aims of the information unit. This takes us to think about indexing from the managerial and strategic point of view in the context of information unities, as it happens in the input and output of the information system. A basic indexing policy should consider the indexing methodologies, the use of controlled vocabularies and lists of authorities (identifiers, author names, place names, etc.), as well as assessment mechanisms. With the purpose of developing a study on the policy of the Latin American indexing in National Libraries and National Archives, as well as of some information systems, it was carried out an exploratory and descriptive diagnosis that consisted of two parts: the functioning and the procedures of indexing in the perspective of management and of the indexer, and the evaluation of information access and retrieval by the user. In order to obtain a representative range of Latin America, the most important countries of South America and Central America and Caribbean were selected in two blocks. With the data analysis collected up to now, it was possible to observe that the results show the inexistence of indexing policies in the twenty-four visited institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]