Breadth, depth or both? : A study of exhaustivity and monographies on musicology in the Swedish National Union Catalogue LIBRIS

This thesis contains an empirical study of exhaustivity in the Swedish National Union Catalogue LIBRIS. The purpose of the study is to examine if fewer numbers of indexing terms in general lead to lower exhaustivity. The study contains two parts, the first part examine the mean of indexing terms per monography in the selection, the second examines the grade of exhaustivity within three groups with a low, moderate or high number of indexing terms. The 55 randomly selected titles were graded on a scale that was created from the indexing theories of Wilfrid F. Lancaster. Results show that even though exhaustivity is on a generally high level in every group, low exhaustivity is more common in the group with fewer indexing terms and less common in the group with a higher number of indexing terms