Subject access refers to the methods and systems by which books,
journals, and other
document
A document is a writing, written, drawing, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of nonfiction, non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ', which denotes ...
s are accessed in a given
bibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like academic journal, journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government an ...
(e.g. a
library classification system). The single records in a bibliographic file are structured in fields and each field can be searchable and combined with other fields. Such searchable data from fields of records are termed access points. Some of these access points contain information such as author name, number of pages, the language of publication, name of publisher ,etc. These are in library jargon termed "descriptive data". Other kinds of access points contain information such as title words, classification codes, indexing terms ,etc. They are termed subject access points.
However, a subject access point is defined as any access point useful for subject searching. There is no precise border between descriptive access points and subject access points. In theory, any access point may hypothetically be used for subject searching.
See also
*
Metadata
Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive ...
*
Subject (documents)
In library and information science documents (such as books, articles and pictures) are classified and searched by subject – as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this ...
References
Library cataloging and classification
{{DEFAULTSORT:Subject Access