Resource Materials System using the KWIC Indexing System

(1968) Resource Materials System using the KWIC Indexing System. Education, Department of

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Abstract

The Midwestern States Educational Information Project (MSEIP) is a federally-funded project designed to develop and implement an educational information system which will be compatible among 13 midwestern states. The MSEIP library serves the Project by organizing and maintaining its resource materials. The MSEIP library system is a method for organization and retrieval of resource materials in the Project library. The system utilizes a modified version of the Key-Word-In-Context (KWIC) indexing system. The KWIC indexing system is a computerized system designed by the International Business Machines Corporation for organizing information by indexing.l KWIC indexing is based upon the theory that a simple way to index information is to use the actual words contained in documents as index terms. This is done by listing the document words in alphabetical order. A refinement over this simple alphabetical listing is to include with each index word those words by which it is surrounded. A further refinement is to exclude, from the index, non-significant words such as prepositions and articles. The KWIC index proper does just that: it excludes words which the program has designated as non-significant, and it lists alphabetically all the remaining words (keywords), with each surrounded by the words which appear with it in the original material. Hence the name, Key-Word-In-Context.