SAP — a new way to produce subject descriptions of books

Within the scope of the Subject Access Project - SAP, at the Lund University Library, a new version of on-line catalo gue for monographic publications has been developed; an effective aid for searches by subject as well as bibliographic data. Using the SAP-indexing method, existing bibliographic catalogue records have been enriched with terms selected from the tables of contents and book indexes. The idea of SAP is to produce subject descriptions of books taken from the books themselves and to make more use of the 'inherent' attributes of a publication. It is also an approach to eliminat ing the known shortcomings of existing standard library classification systems in describing the varied and extensive contents of a book by means of limited numbers of classifica tion codes. By this augmented subject description of the con tents of books (SAP), we provide retrieval capabilities for the user of monographs at a comparably low cost.