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Voted YES with Comments on NISO Z39.4-202x, Criteria For Indexes

Question:

Do you approve this standard (NISO Z39.4, Criteria for Indexes) for publication as an American National Standard?

Description:

This standard provides guidelines for the content, organization, and presentation of indexes used for the retrieval of documents and parts of documents. It deals with the principles of indexing regardless of the type of material indexed, the indexing method used, the medium of the index, or the method of presentation for searching. It emphasizes three processes essential for all indexes: comprehensive design, vocabulary management, and syntax.

Comments:

While the standard should be approved there are certain issue that need to be considered either before the current standard is officially approved or in a future version:

1.Since it aims to have indexes covering the museum catalogs/collections (2.2 Types of Documents), the standard consider archival finding aids?
2.The appendix listed some controlled vocabularies, but they are still limited and need to be expanded
3.As more research reports are required to include the datasets, the standard should be be able to guide the related actions? (So far it does not address these.)
[E.g., the whole 6 Types of Indexes, especially on:
6.3 Indexes by Type or Extent of Indexable Matter
a. Full text of documents
b. Abstracts
c. Titles only
d. First lines only (for example, first lines of poems)]

Comments provided by Marcia Zeng