Partial Coordination. I. The Best of Pre-Coordination and Post-Coordination

The introduction of computerized post-coordination has solved many of the problems of pre-coordinated subject access. However, the adoption of computerized postcoordination results in the loss of some pre-coordination benefits. Specifically, the effect of hiding terms within the context of others is lost in post-coordination which gives lead status to every document term. This results in spurious matches of terms out of context. Library patrons and Internet searchers are increasingly dissatisfied with subject access performance, in part because of unmanageably large retrieval sets. The need to enhance precision and limit the size of retrieval sets motivates this work which proposes partial coordination, an approach which incorporates the advantages of computer search with the ability of pre-coordination to limit spurious partial matches and thereby enhance precision.