Index

Displayed Index in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Displayed Index in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Displayed Index may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Displayed indexes are indexes that are displayed for direct examination, browsing, or scanning by users, as opposed to non-displayed indexes that are meant for computer manipulation and are not displayed for human examination.

Indexing in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Index, Indexing in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Index, Indexing may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. An index is any device that is (or can be) used to indicate or point to something of interest. Indexing is the creation of such indexes. Indexes are used in many fields in addition to library and information science, such as the consumer price index in economics, where the index points to the rise and fall of prices. In information retrieval, an index is used to indicate the content and features of messages, their texts and documentary units, and their location and/or the location of particular content or features within these messages, texts, and documentary units. There are many types and varieties of indexes, corresponding to types of Information Retrieval databases listed in this Dictionary. Indexes are produced in many different ways, both by human analysis and computer algorithmic processing.

Kwac Index in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Kwac Index in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Kwac Index may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. See keyword indexing.

Kwic Index in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Kwic Index in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Kwic Index may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. See keyword indexing.

Kwoc Index in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Kwoc Index in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Kwoc Index may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. See keyword indexing.

Non-Displayed Index in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Non-Displayed Index in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Non-Displayed Index may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. A non-displayed index is one that is not displayed for direct human use. Instead it is designed to be searched by machine, mechanically in the early days and electronically in more recent decades. Only in the past century have we begun creating indexes that are used for machine matching rather than for visual inspection by the human eye. The earliest such indexes predated the computer, but they relied on early examples of the same kind of matching techniques (exact match syntax) that became nearly universal with the advent of computer-based Information Retrieval systems. An example of a pre-computer non-displayed index are the cards used in the optical coincidence, or peek-a-boo, retrieval system that is described in section 5.1.3. Now non-displayed indexes are almost always used by computer programs. Such indexes may not even exist until a search is performed. They may be created ad hoc or on the fly for each search, or inverted files of terms may be created in advance of searches in order to speed up the machine matching process. Inverted files are created by taking all, or selected, terms from message, text, or document descriptions or from full text, and sorting them in ways that speed up machine processing.

Index in Law Libraries

The follow definition of Index is of use in law library research: A list, in alphabetical or numerical order, of the topics, names, etc. that are treated or mentioned in a publication or group of publications, along with references to the pages where the topics are discussed. Author, subject, and title indexes are common; the type of index depends on the type of material covered in the publication.

Resources

See Also

• Library
• Law Library
• Legal Deposit
• Public Law Library
• Information Science
• Research
• Investigation
• Legal Research
• Study