INDEXING POLICIES FOR KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION AND REPRESENTATION: A CASE STUDY IN A LIBRARY SYSTEM IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON REGION

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the elements of indexing policy used by professional catalogers in a university library system in the Amazon region. The methodology was exploratory and a case study, using a questionnaire as an instrument and applied to 36 university libraries at a federal institution. The results obtained from the 12 participating libraries identified the elements of the policy: human resources, clientele, subject coverage, selection and acquisition of source documents, indexing process, documentary language, level of completeness, search strategy and evaluation of the system, as well as the absence of an indexing policy formalized in an indexing manual. It concluded that drawing up an indexing policy for the library system can help to systematize the indexing process and optimize retrieval, proposing reflections on indexing policy in the Brazilian Amazon context.