Derived search keys for bibliographic retrieval

Abstract

A principle of information science states that the entropy of a set of symbols is maximised when the probability of occurrence of each becomes the same. This paper presents the results of a number of experiments which utilise this principle to construct fixed length keys from pertinent fields in order to locate and retrieve unique records as well as clusters with lexically homogeneous information. Each key incorporates codes derived by various positional selection methods and their discriminating strength proves to be well over 95%.