DOCUMENT RESUME

Proposed is a measure of indexing consistency based on the concept of "fuzzy sets. " By this procedure a higher consistency value is assigned if indexers agree on the more important terms than if they agree on less important terms. Measures of the quality of an indexer's work and exhaustivity of indexing are also proposed. Experimental data on indexing consistency is presented for certain categories of indexers, and consistency, quality, and exhaustivity values are compared and analyzed. The analysis of indexing exhaustivity leads to the conclusion that the increase of information as a result of group indexing obeys the same law as that of the scattering of information (Bradford), of scientific productivity (Lotka), and vocabulary distribution (Zipf). (RP