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which were then studied to weed out synonyms. When synonyms were found, they added "see also" headings to those cards. The second set would then be added, using those synonyms. They found that the addition of new terms started to flatten out at about 4,000 entries, and after 10,000 only very specific technical terms were being added.
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To retrieve a document, the user selects potentially useful key terms and extracts those cards from the uniterm index. To find this article, the user might select "indexing" and "library", and retrieves those cards from the uniterm catalog. These cards will have numbers for many different documents,
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However, this was found not to be a serious problem in practice, and those few examples that did crop up were solved by adding "delta cards", see-also entries that incorporated a direction. In this case, the "US" card would have a see-also entry for "USΔ", that card would only contain those entries
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for the primary card index as they would for any work. Additionally, they will select a small number of keywords from the title or body of the work that can be used to look it up, and these are also written on the card. For instance, a document on icing of air ducts in aircraft might be filed under
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A concern that was raised when the concept was first introduced was that the terms might return a large number of false positives due to terms being used to describe completely different concepts. In particular, terms that might mean different things depending on their order were believed to be an
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cards and find that there are other terms that commonly appear, perhaps "aerodynamics". These might suggest additional terms that could be used to narrow their search. They can then return to the uniterm catalog to apply these new terms to return additional documents or further focus their search.
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They found one major advantage of the
Uniterm system was that the librarians did not have to have an understanding of the material in order to correctly catalog it. Simply selecting terms that appeared in the title or were obviously important within the text would often result in a useful uniterm
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The cards in the main catalog also contain the uniterms used to file that entry, forming a cross-index. A user that selects the cards for "propeller" and "aeroplane" may find many intersecting works on the cards. Returning to the main index they can look at the uniterms recorded on the main index
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presented a problem; was a paper on "air ducts" the same or different than one on "air intakes"? They suggested this could be addressed by splitting the works into sets of about 1,000 entries and building the catalog out in sections. The first set of 1,000 documents might produce 1,000 uniterms,
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The librarian then looks in the
Uniterm catalog for cards with those terms on them. If they are not found, they are created by writing the keyword at the top of the card and then dividing the lower portion into ten vertical sections, labeled 0 to 9. The last digit of the accession number is then
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The user then scans the card to see if a particular accession number appears on both cards; splitting the cards into 10 columns is intended to make the visual scanning process simpler. Numbers that appear on both cards are likely relevant to the search, and can then be looked up directly or by
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Taube introduced the
Uniterm concept in a 1951 paper, "Coordinate Indexing of Scientific Fields", part of the Symposium on Mechanical Aids to Chemical Documentation. The next year, in partnership with Gerald Sophar, Taube formed Documentation, Inc. The company offered commercial retrieval and
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written on the card in that column, for instance, if the last digit of the accession number is 5, the entire accession number would be written in column 5. If the card for that term is found in the collection, the new accession is simply added to the correct column of the existing card.
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in order to gather as much of these materials as possible. Along with examples of the aircraft and various weapons, these efforts returned millions of pages of technical documentation. The desire to ease access into these enormous collections led to a great expansion in the field of
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in 1951. The name is a contraction of "unit" and "term", referring to its use of single words as the basis of the index, the "uniterms". Taube referred to the overall concept as "Coordinate
Indexing", but today the entire concept is generally referred to as Uniterm as well.
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writer and then feed them into the COMAC, also known as the IBM 9900. The COMAC pulled those uniterm cards and then used optical systems to find matching items. It then returned a new card with those numbers that was then sent into the
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issue. If one was looking for "American exports to Canada", "Canada", "US" and "exports" would return a large number of documents on
Canadian exports into the US as well, perhaps overwhelming the result set.
86:, but over time it was merged with similar caches of US research to form an ever-growing collection of technical papers. The collection grew so large and varied that a new operational group, the
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entry. This contrasted with traditional hierarchical approaches, where selecting the proper spot within the hierarchy often required some, or considerable, knowledge of the underlying field.
50:. Uniterm was among the most popular post-coordinate indexing systems, although some of its success was due to Taube's company winning contracts to index huge technical libraries.
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Taube's original paper indicates that a significant advantage of the
Uniterm concept is its ability to be automated. In essence, the uniterm lookup process is looking for the
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Uniterm was popular in the United States for large technical collections, which led to considerable study on the system. One particularly useful effort was the
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system. This is opposed to a pre-coordinate system, where the subject of the document results it being given a particular number, as in the
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those keywords across multiple topics in order to find documents that match all of the terms. The result of a uniterm search is a set of
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that can then be used to retrieve the matching documents. Uniterm is based on existing accession numbers, so it is technically a
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146:. The accession numbers have no meaning in the Uniterm index, so they may use any of the common systems like the
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94:. ASTIA began running experiments in indexing the collection, and it was from this work that Uniterm emerged.
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to develop the "Continuous
Multiple Access Collator", or COMAC. Users would make search term selections on a
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465:"Experiments with the IBM-9900 and a Discussion of an Improved COMAC as Suggested by These Experiments"
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The development of
Uniterm, and other new indexing systems, ultimately traces its history to the late
166:"air", "ducts" and "icing", but perhaps not "aircraft" which would be found on too many documents.
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period. Aware of the advanced aircraft and rocket technologies developed in
Germany, the US formed
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of several terms, or as Taube referred to it, the "coordinates". To this end, they partnered with
90:(ASTIA), was formed in 1951 to manage it. This group eventually came under the management of the
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The same effort also revealed a number of problems and suggested solutions. One was that
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indexing services. Among their largest efforts was a 1958 contract with the newly formed
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for instance, the "library" card might contain a listing for a book on the
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As new works are added to the collection, the librarian will make a normal
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Uniterm is designed to allow rapid lookups on topic keywords and then
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Installation Manual for the
Uniterm System of Coordinate Indexing
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the US. Uniterms on the USΔ page are only those for US exports.
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As in "things that are coordinated", not "a physical location".
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511:"Problems in the Application of Uniterm Coordinate Indexing"
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to index their entire technical library, and later, make
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In the US, the aeronautical collection was first sent to
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that refers to the documents in the collection by their
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Uniterm is based on the concept of making a separate
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Sanford, John; Theriault, Frederick (January 1956).
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206:'s effort to catalog their 70,000-work collection.
443:The Washington Post and Times-Herald (1959–1973)
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441:"Mortimer Taube Dies; Founded Data Service".
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154:, or in many cases, simply an incrementing
88:Armed Services Technical Information Agency
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277:"The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval"
458:(Technical report). ASTIA. October 1953.
494:. Atlantic Publishers. pp. 14–20.
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190:if partial accession numbers are used.
556:Library cataloging and classification
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488:Sharma, C.K.; Sharma, A.K. (2007).
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491:Information Process and Retrieval
469:Journal of Chemical Documentation
463:Taube, Mortimer (January 1962).
152:Universal Decimal Classification
515:College and Research Libraries
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425:Sanford & Theriault 1956
410:Sanford & Theriault 1956
398:Sanford & Theriault 1956
148:Dewey Decimal Classification
126:, the first computer with a
48:Dewey Decimal Classification
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198:Advantages and criticisms
293:Sharma & Sharma 2007
204:National Security Agency
92:Atomic Energy Commission
16:Subject indexing system
445:. 1965. pp. A24.
176:Library of Alexandria
73:information retrieval
26:system introduced by
528:10.5860/crl_17_01_19
186:looking in the main
481:10.1021/c160004a007
66:and UK the similar
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80:US Army Air Force
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279:. Bellcore.
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320:Taube 1962
305:Times 1965
254:References
163:index card
128:hard drive
119:punch card
521:: 19–23.
259:Citations
104:microfilm
550:Category
215:synonyms
182:cards.
134:Concept
54:History
20:Uniterm
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456:(PDF)
234:Notes
22:is a
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