Library and Information Science

With the rapid growth of publications, information devices such as computers have been introduced into the services in academic libraries recently. These devices, however, are not adequetely applicable to technical services such as classification and cataloging.

As the progress of computer science and knowledge engineering, a lot of expert systems have been developed in a variety of the fields. It might be possible to apply the technology to the intellectual aspect of the technical services, namely classification. To construct an expert system for a particular field, it is indispensable to analyze the information processing behavior of the professionals.

This paper discusses an underlying framework of classifying behavior in terms of information processing based on the experiment carried out at Keio University Mita Library and Information Center. As the result, the following conclusions have been obtained.

1. There is a large difference between literary works and scholarly publications in the process of classification.
2. First step in the process of classification is to decide whether the book is a literary work or not.
3. The classification process of scholarly publications is as follows: Classification experts, i) extract words that express a theme of the book from bibliographic data as title, belt, contents, and so on. ii) check the extracted words with relative index. iii) if the words are not included in the index, pick up alternative words such as synonyms, related terms, broader terms and narrower terms. iv) choose the classification number by the words which are more frequent than any others.
4. Expert system can apply to the process of classification.