Knowledge Organisation and Retrieval Questions and Answers

Answer: C

'Treatment' belongs to the Energy facet.

In Ranganathan's fundamental categories, Energy [E] covers actions, operations, processes and problems. In the Colon Classification main class L Medicine, the organ is the Personality facet and disease is an Energy isolate; treatment is an action done to deal with that disease, so it too is an energy isolate, enumerated in the second round of energy after the disease.

Personality is the organ or system being studied, Matter covers materials and properties (such as a drug as a substance), and Time is the chronological facet. Treatment is none of these: it is something done, which is the mark of Energy.

Answer: C

The relationship is that cataloguing codes could include ISBD.

The International Standard Bibliographic Description, developed by IFLA from 1969, prescribes only the descriptive part of a record: its areas, their order and the punctuation that separates them. Cataloguing codes go further, with rules for access points, headings and uniform titles, and they incorporate ISBD as their description; AACR2, for example, based its descriptive chapters on ISBD.

So ISBD does not include the cataloguing rules (the containment runs the other way), the two are not the same thing, and they are plainly related.

Answer: C

The AND operator is used to narrow the search.

AND retrieves only records that contain all the terms combined. 'Libraries AND automation' returns records about both together, which is fewer than either term alone, so each extra AND term makes the result set smaller and more precise.

OR is the operator that widens a search, retrieving records with any of the terms (synonyms, variant spellings). NOT also narrows, by excluding a term. No Boolean operator begins or ends a search; those options describe nothing the operators do.

Answer: B

DDC 23 contains 6 tables.

The 23rd edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification (2011) has six auxiliary tables:

1. T1 Standard Subdivisions
2. T2 Geographic Areas, Historical Periods, Biography
3. T3 Subdivisions for the Arts, for Individual Literatures, for Specific Literary Forms
4. T4 Subdivisions of Individual Languages and Language Families
5. T5 Ethnic and National Groups
6. T6 Languages

Seven tables belonged to older editions, up to DDC 20, which still had a separate Table 7 for groups of persons; it was dropped in DDC 21. Five and eight do not match any recent edition.

Answer: A

The chronological order is (iii), (iv), (i), (ii).

1. Cutter's Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue: 1876.
2. The Anglo-American (AA) Code: 1908.
3. Ranganathan's Classified Catalogue Code (CCC): 1934.
4. AACR2: 1978.

AACR2 is the latest of the four, which rules out every code starting with (ii) or ending with (iii). The only remaining question is Cutter's rules against the AA Code, and Cutter's 1876 rules came before the joint code of 1908.

Answer: D

An IR thesaurus does not provide the meanings of terms.

An information retrieval thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary for indexing and searching. What it records for each term is its relationships: broader and narrower terms (hierarchy), equivalent terms (use and used-for references for synonyms) and related terms. At most it adds a scope note to fix how a term is to be used.

It is not a dictionary, so it does not give definitions or meanings. The three other options are the very relationships a thesaurus exists to display.

Answer: C

All of P.K. Atre's documents are rendered under Atre, Pralhad Keshav.

Under AACR2 a personal author is entered under the surname followed by the forenames, in the fullest form the author commonly uses. Where a person writes some works under the real name and others under a pseudonym, AACR2 treats them as separate bibliographic identities: works under each name are entered under that name, linked by references.

So the prose published as P.K. Atre, the documents the question asks about, goes under Atre, Pralhad Keshav, while the poems would go under Keshav Kumar. 'P.K. Atre' is not in heading form (surname first), and the two options that mix the pseudonym into the heading combine the identities that the rule keeps apart.

Answer: B

The pre-coordinate systems come from Ranganathan and Austin, so the answer is (i) and (iv) are correct.

In a pre-coordinate index the indexer combines the concepts into a heading when the index is made. S.R. Ranganathan devised chain indexing, which builds subject headings from the chain of a class number, and Derek Austin devised PRECIS (Preserved Context Index System), used for the British National Bibliography from 1971.

Mortimer Taube is the wrong pick: his Uniterm system is the classic post-coordinate system, where single terms are combined by the searcher at search time. Larry Page co-founded Google and devised PageRank, a web ranking method, not an indexing language. So every option naming (ii) or (iii) is wrong.

Answer: B

The isolate is India.

In Ranganathan's facet analysis an isolate is a component of a subject that is not itself a subject, such as a space, time or common isolate. India is a space isolate: it qualifies a subject, as in 'History of India' or 'Agriculture in India', but is not a field of study by itself.

History, Medicine and Law are basic subjects (main classes in the Colon Classification), not isolates. They form the base to which isolates are attached, so none of them answers the question.

Answer: B

The emptying digit provides hospitality in array.

An array is a set of coordinate classes at one level of a scheme. With single digits an array would soon run out of places. Ranganathan's emptying digit is a digit that, coming after another digit, empties it of its ordinal value, so further digits can be added at the same level and new coordinate classes interpolated. It is one of his devices for hospitality in array, with the octave and gap devices.

Hospitality in chain, extending a class downward into subdivisions, comes from decimal fraction notation and the use of facets, not from the emptying digit. 'Hospitality in notation' is not the established term, and 'broken order' names no notational device.