This book is a celebration of 50 years contribution to the field of librarianship and information science by the American professor Pauline Atherton Cochrane. It is a collection of papers exploring various elements of subject access.
The volume opens with eulogistic praise of Cochrane by colleagues. It is particularly interesting to read about how difficult it was in the 1960s and1970s for women to succeed in academia and achieve the recognition they deserved. Cochrane was one of only two presidents of the American Society for Information Science.
Robert Fugman opens the contributions with an impassioned article on how little has changed for the better in the case of subject access and of searches for topics despite all the advances in information technology. He argues that there is a fundamental need for change and that many of the obstacles are surmountable. Index languages, full text storage versus indexing and classification, user evaluation and information technology are all explored. Fugman concludes that the profession needs to shed the positivist philosophy that has hindered progress.
Bjorn Tell provides an entertaining history of the development of MARC records and natural text searching.
Donald King contributes an interesting article on the career of Pauline Atherton Cochrane in the world of information retrieval systems, which is also of historical interest. This is supported by a curriculum vitae for Cochrane elsewhere in the book.
There is also an excellent article on the user‐centred approach to the design of information systems. That means that systems are developed according to what users need and not just according to universal rules. This contains useful material on user studies.
Using Ranganathan’s five laws of library science, Linda C. Smith writes about how information technology may enable us to better meet the needs of a particular category of information user, those undertaking interdisciplinary research. Vinh‐The Lam later discusses the specific issue of subject access to monographs on OPAC.
Karen Drabenstott continues the theme by discussing Web search strategies. Her article examines whether search strategies based on how librarians search commercial information retrieval systems might help Web searches. However, she concludes that Web searching is different from searching commercial information retrieval systems and that Web searches must develop strategies that let search engines do the job they were designed to do. Drabenstott suggests six different strategies depending on the number of facets and search words.
Finally, Eric H. Johnson explains his work on a “heterogeneous information retrieval” system. The variety of databases demand the building of object‐oriented retrieval interfaces because of the demands of users for a seamless interaction between all the tasks they are doing.
The whole work has an excellent general index and each article has thorough notes and bibliography. It may not provide anything groundbreaking to the information professional working in subject access but it is a worthwhile read for the wide profession.
I am wary of those collections of papers on a broad theme, but this works very well. Much of the content confirmed what I already knew, which is always heartening, and yet it also presented challenging concepts that had me mulling over new ideas. This is a worthy tribute to an obviously highly regarded information professional.
