Indexing policies in Latin America

Abstract

The indexing policy must not be considered as a list of procedures to be followed, but a philosophy that reflects the interests and aims of the information unit. This takes us to think about indexing from the managerial and strategic point of view in the context of information unities, as it happens in the input and output of the information system. A basic indexing policy should consider the indexing methodologies, the use of controlled vocabularies and lists of authorities (identifiers, author names, place names, etc.), as well as assessment mechanisms. With the purpose of developing a study on the policy of the Latin American indexing in National Libraries and National Archives, as well as of some information systems, it was carried out an exploratory and descriptive diagnosis that consisted of two parts: the functioning and the procedures of indexing in the perspective of management and of the indexer, and the evaluation of information access and retrieval by the user. In order to obtain a representative range of Latin America, the most important countries of South America and Central America and Caribbean were selected in two blocks. With the data analysis collected up to now, it was possible to observe that the results show the inexistence of indexing policies in the twenty-four visited institutions.