Guidelines for Assigning Keywords

The keyword section of the review is intended to provide access points for people searching the Internet using resources like Yahoo or Alta Vista.

Look at your review and determine its basic scope: is it an art site, literature, or science-related? Think general, then narrow things down to the detail level. If it is an art site, is it about a specific artist, or period of art?

Finally, keep the keywords concise--aim for a minimum of two and a maximum of four.

• First classify the resource in LC or Dewey, then use the subject classification as a subject heading.
  • After determining the subject heading(s), create subject access points using LCSH or another common source of subject headings such as MeSH, Sears, etc.

• Extract the following access points, exactly as they are given in the Internet resource:
  • Title of resource
  • Alternative form or abbreviation of resource title, if well known
  • Host institution of resource
  • Sponsoring organization of resource
• Extract noun phrases from the following, for use as subject access points:
  • Resource titles
  • Top-level screen or menu titles (such as anything inside <h1> >/h1>
  • markup on a WWW site, or an important ftp site directory (eg. 'trumpet' at ftp.utas.edu.au))
  • FAQs, 'About...' files, help files, README files or attached descriptions (such as those used by newsgroups or listservs)
  • Filenames, document titles, or linknames of importance (although I don't think it's a good idea to extract linknames verbatim... an external link ought to index itself, not an intermediary)
  • Subject phrases that don't occur in any of the above, but recur frequently in the resource
  • Subject phrases that don't occur anywhere in the resource, but which are tacitly referred to (eg. 'Computer Software' for a review of oak.oakland.edu... that's what's distributed there, but the phrase doesn't often show up in the README files)
  Stop whenever you think you've achieved thorough coverage of the resource.

• Try to identify and eliminate any redundancies in the access points you've created.

• What you have left are your keywords. Enter them in the keyword section of the template:

  Keywords:

  Plasma physics

  Physics--Plasma waves
  

  UI Plasma Wave Group Home Page
  

  University of Iowa
  

  Physics Department, University of Iowa
  

  Plasma waves
  

  Solitons

  This could describe a WWW page for the UI Plasma Wave group at the University of Iowa, which is sharing results on certain plasma waves, or solitons, observed in their homemade tokamak.

  

  For more information about assigning keywords,
  contact flick@calvin.usc.edu

  

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