• Journal of Information Management
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.61-79
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• 1995

The purpose of this paper is to investigate search efficiency of controlled vocabulary versus uncontrolled vocabulary subject access in online catalog systems. The question of the effectiveness of controlled versus uncontrolled vocabulary in information retrieval has been raised in many literatures. A debate continues in the Library and Information Science Professions over the relative merit, appropriateness, and efficiency of uncontrolled vocabulary subject access in online catalog systems. Actually users used to combine uncontrolled vocabulary subject searching with controlled vocabulary subject searching. But the success of user's subject search depends on his choice of search terms. Also the technical developments that facilitate cooperation among information services in general make it increasingly possible for such cooperation to take place on an international level. In this study, several common types of vocabularies on online catalog systems are described and compared, especially usages of vocabularies in multilingual environment are analyzed.