Subject access

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Subject access refers to the methods and systems by which books, journals, and other documents are accessed in a given bibliographic database (e.g. a library classification system). The single records in a bibliographic file are structured in fields and each field can be searchable and combined with other fields. Such searchable data from fields of records are termed access points. Some of these access points contain information such as author name, number of pages, the language of publication, name of publisher ,etc. These are in library jargon termed "descriptive data". Other kinds of access points contain information such as title words, classification codes, indexing terms ,etc. They are termed subject access points. [1]

However, a subject access point is defined as any access point useful for subject searching. There is no precise border between descriptive access points and subject access points. In theory, any access point may hypothetically be used for subject searching.

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The OpenSIGLE repository provides open access to the bibliographic records of the former SIGLE database. The creation of the OpenSIGLE archive was decided by some major European STI centres, members of the former European network EAGLE for the collection and dissemination of grey literature. OpenSIGLE was developed by the French INIST-CNRS, with assistance from the German FIZ Karlsruhe and the Dutch Grey Literature Network Service (GreyNet). OpenSIGLE is hosted on an INIST-CNRS server at Nancy. Part of the open Access movement, OpenSIGLE is referenced by the international Directory of Open Access Repositories.

In library and information science documents are classified and searched by subject – as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this field. Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them findable. There are many ways to do this and in general there is not always consensus about which subject should be assigned to a given document. To optimize subject indexing and searching, we need to have a deeper understanding of what a subject is. The question: "what is to be understood by the statement 'document A belongs to subject category X'?" has been debated in the field for more than 100 years

References

  1. Hjorland, Birger. "Subject access points". Archived from the original on 31 May 2011. Retrieved 20 April 2011.