Value-Added Searching

This article discusses the importance of adding value to information products and services for library database searching. It describes something added by human intellectual effort to the basic bibliographic or textual information found in the records. Database searchers can use the value-added information to refine or improve their search. A type of value that is added to database searching is editing and analyzing what the searchers do with the search results before presenting it to the user. The positive points are obvious for professional searchers, but value-added information present trade-offs to the database producer and to the searcher. Most of the major bibliographic databases add controlled descriptors. This descriptors allow searching for meaning rather than just for a string of characters. Searchers recognize the value of descriptors and codes, but the trade-off associated with the use of descriptor is the cost of purchasing relevant thesauri or the cost of checking the thesaurus online. Classification is also a way of providing value-added information, which allows broader and narrower concepts to be searched easily. A variety of value-added information, including abstracts and machine-added indexing, can be integrated in databases, based on the producers prerogative.

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