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Re: Indexing periodicals



From: Daniel Sokolow@MCGRAW-HILL on 06/01/2000 09:47 AM


To:   archives@listserv.muohio.edu
cc:
Subject:  Re: Indexing periodicals

I'm another big fan of indexing periodicals.  One of my greatest research tools
is our index to our in-house newspaper.  A graduate MLS student was here about
two years ago, and she went through about five years of the paper, indexing it
in our Inmagic database system (I've talked about that a lot, so I won't tout
it's benefits again).  I only wish we had more than five year's worth in the
system, because it saves me hours of paging through back issues looking for what
I need.

A few things to note:

1) Try and make sure of quality control; bless her, our grad student did a lot
of work, but English is her second language, and we've had to spend time going
back to edit her work.  She missed articles, misspelled, and abstracted in some
peculiar ways.  We're much further ahead than we could be, but I think it's
essential that you make sure the information is put in according to some
standards and your data entry people/person are consistent.

2) See Also fields; definitely useful, especially in an organization like ours
where departments, divisions, and entire segments of the corporation are
shifted, rearranged, renamed, etc. at the drop of a hat.  It's nice to have a
cross reference field to other names of those departments to make sure you get
all the hits you need.

We've included lists of people, people in photographs, organizations, some
subject keywords, and of course an abstract of the article.  Obviously you
should try & tailor your system to your own needs, but I think those are some of
the critical pieces of information for a periodical index.

DS


Daniel Sokolow
Corporate Archivist
The McGraw-Hill Companies
1221 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
daniel_sokolow@mcgraw-hill.com

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