The concept of ‘aboutness’ in subject indexing

The common view of the ‘aboutness’ of documents is that the index entries (or classifications) assigned to documents represent or indicate in some way the total contents of documents; indexing and classifying are seen as processes involving the ‘summarization’ of the texts of documents. In this paper an alternative concept of ‘aboutness’ is proposed based on an analysis of the linguistic organization of texts, which is felt to be more appropriate in many indexing environments (particularly in non‐specialized libraries and information services) and which has implications for the evaluation of the effectiveness of indexing systems.