The Legacy of Ranganathan

Classificatory Principles in the British Technology Index

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how classificatory principles were applied to the British Technology Index (BTI) which was launched in 1962. BTI had a sound theoretical basis for indexing. The theory was set out in E.J. Coates’ book on subject catalogues published in 1960, and he became the first editor of BTI. While the book was written under the influence of Ranganathan’s theory of classification, Coates put forth a new approach to alphabetical subject cataloguing. The new approach comprised a set of syntactic rules based on Ranganathan’s facet analysis as further illuminated by Farradane’s relational analysis. A feature of BTI was the block structure of related subjects under each main subject heading, which was realized by creating logically articulated subject headings and by a chain procedure for generating inversion cross-references from these subject headings. It is demonstrated that there was a close correlation between the whole indexing procedure of BTI and faceted classification. Concludes that the essence of BTI indexing system was relational analysis in the context of classification.