Before you can start to build a classmark or assign a subject heading to a document you must first decide what the document is about. This analysis of content is quite separate from any particular system of classification, and should be carried out independently of the system. You shouldn't be trying to fit the document into the classification scheme, but making an objective assessment of its content, and this chapter is about how you do that. (I've generally used the term ‘subject content’ to refer to what the item is about, but you may, in more theoretical works, come across the expressions ‘intellectual content’ and ‘semantic content’. These are just more impressive ways of describing the subject.)

The problem of ‘aboutness’; indexer consistency and subjectivity

The notion of ‘aboutness’ is an essential part of indexing, classification and subject cataloguing, but it contrasts markedly with the task of descriptive cataloguing. In the majority of cases it's not too difficult for the cataloguer to determine the author and the title of a book, and having found the author and title there is generally no dispute as to what they are. Sometimes the subject is similarly straightforward. Look at Figure 8.1: you can see that the author is Bruce Campbell, and the title is Birds of coast and sea. The title suggests that this is a book about birds, and there seems no reason to doubt that. Now look at Figure 8.2: you can see that the author is John Updike, and the title is Hoping for a hoopoe. But what about the subject? It seems at least possible that this book isn't about hoopoes, but how can you find out one way or the other? Unfortunately there's no part of a book which will tell you plainly and unequivocally what its subject is; you must decide this for yourself.

Deciding on the subject of a book can be tricky because it is a very subjective activity. What I understand to be the subject of a book may differ from your interpretation, and research has shown that if indexers think about the same item on two different occasions, they don't reach exactly the same conclusion about its content. Even experienced classifiers find it hard to describe accurately how they go about deciding on the subject of a book because it is largely an intuitive process.