Vocabulaire employé pour l'accès thématique aux documents d'archives patrimoniaux : étude linguistique exploratoire de termes de recherche, de description, d'indexation
Users carry out searches for archives by subject, yet the access offered in the archives is mainly by provenance resulting in a gap between the desired access and the offered access. To meet users’ demand, some archival services already offer access by subject. Research instruments used by these services provide the basis for our research. We analyzed the vocabulary used by archivists to describe and to index archival documents by subject. That is to say, the choice of words and the semantic relationships that exist between the meanings of these words in the documents from which they come from (descriptions, index). We analyzed both the users’ vocabulary in the questions asked to the reference archivist by email and the answers offered by the latter. Thus, our study covers a large part of the communicative chain between users and archives they are looking for by subject. The comparison of these two vocabularies has brought out the semantic gap that separates them. By studying the terms used for research, for description, and for indexing, we wish to contribute to the advancement of knowledge on the vocabulary used for thematic access to heritage archives (VATAP). We have chosen corpus studies as our research methodology. We study the semantic relationships between the terms in a corpus from four data sources (user-to-reference questions, reference archivists’ answers, descriptions, indexes), collected from three different archives services. We limit our research to data obtained from large archival repositories as they have the means to develop tools to guide and facilitate access. The originality of our research lies in the application of linguistics to the study of VATAP. Our study describes VATAP and contributes to a better accessing of heritage archives by subject. We accomplish this by formulating recommendations for the archivists’ use based on the study of the most frequent semantic relationships in our corpus. The linguistic formalization needed for our research could serve as a premise for automatic indexing. This exploratory study of users’ vocabulary allows participating institutions to better understand this aspect of their users’ profile.
Subject access Semantic relationships Heritage archives Linguistic analysis Vocabulary Subject indexing Subject research Archival reference Archives users