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The Book House is an interactive, multimedia, online public access catalogue designed to support casual, novice users in information retrieval. It uses icons, text and animation in the display interface in order to enhance the utility of the system. A prerequisite for the design of The Book House was a cognitive analysis of users' information needs and search queries. The paper describes The Book House and discusses its relevance as a solution to the current OPAC developments.

In acknowledgement of the key position of the concept of ‘aboutness’ in the indexing process, the definition of the term ‘about’ seems to have become the crux of the discussion about indexing systems. ‘About’ is not a simple and self‐evident term in the process of indexing, and the earlier view of a one‐sided relationship between the term and the contents of documents is called into question. A new definition of ‘about’ is needed and a short review of recent contributions on the subject will illustrate some of the suggestions put forward for operational and functional definitions of the ‘aboutness’ of documents. The problem has also been tackled through experiments on alternative design criteria for indexing schemes (Swift et al).

These papers describe the development and evaluation of a new classification system for fiction based on an analysis of users' formulations of needs. Users of fiction generally do not require specific books to be precisely identified. Their criteria for accepting books are related to a combination of several different features, such as subject matter, emotional experience, readability etc. Previous attempts to design alternative classification schemes for fiction are reviewed, and the inadequacies of these systems are discussed. New retrieval tools such as a systematic card catalogue and alphabetic indexes have been constructed on the basis of a multi‐dimensional classification system. A number of search tests in laboratory conditions have been conducted in order to evaluate the different search tools. Finally, in this second paper, issues like differences between concept identification in fiction and non‐fiction, recall/precision, vocabulary control etc., are raised and suggestions are made for future experiments with subject approaches to the searching of fiction.

These papers describe the development and evaluation of a new classification system for fiction based on an analysis of users' formulations of needs. Users of fiction generally do not require specific books to be precisely identified. Their criteria for accepting books are related to a combination of several different features, such as subject matter, emotional experience, readability etc. Previous attempts to design alternative classification schemes for fiction are reviewed, and the inadequacies of these systems are discussed. New retrieval tools such as a systematic card catalogue and alphabetic indexes have been constructed on the basis of a multi‐dimensional classification system. A number of search tests in laboratory conditions have been conducted in order to evaluate the different search tools. Finally, issues like differences between concept identification in fiction and non‐fiction, recall/precision, vocabulary control etc., are raised and suggestions are made for future experiments with subject approaches to the searching of fiction.

In a recent RQ column, Sharon L. Baker reviewed the profession's literature in the area of readers' advisory services. She found that very little research existed in the area of readers' advisory services. The research that does exist is focused on “passive” readers' advisory strategies. Baker is a leader in this area and her articles on overload and browsing, the use of displays, and genre classification are essential to understanding the adult fiction reader and ways in which libraries can assist these individuals in locating new authors and titles of interest.

The subject description of novels in library catalogues is traditionally limited to the classification number with no description of the story. On the other hand, enthusiastic readers describe novels by tags or reviews in Web services. The purpose of this paper is to analyse readers' descriptions of novels and suggest an enhancement of the catalogue record which would be useful to the readers.

The original research involved a content analysis of tags and reviews written by users in the online bookstore Amazon.com, the online reader advisory service LibraryThing, and the reading promotion project Primorci beremo. The results were compared to previously published results.

The characteristics that most frequently elicit comments by readers are: the names of the creators and literary characters, geographic names and the titles of works, the time frame in which the story takes place, and the literary genre. Their evaluation of a novel was expressed with an opinion, an analysis, or a professional review. Awards were mentioned, and readers often also expressed their personal experience with the novel. They connected the novel with a sequel or series, with otherwise related novels, movies, etc. Often, pictures of the cover and other factual data were included.

Research was limited to readers' experiences and descriptions of literary works written in prose.

It is suggested that the time frame, genre and awards received should be included in the functional requirements models.

Original research was conducted over a longer period of time. The results were re‐evaluated and compared to previously published results from studies by different researchers.

This article presents a theoretical investigation of the concept of ‘subject’ or ‘subject matter’ in library and information science. Most conceptions of ‘subject’ in the literature are not explicit but implicit. Various indexing and classification theories, including automatic indexing and citation indexing, have their own more or less implicit concepts of subject. This fact puts the emphasis on making the implicit theories of ‘subject matter’ explicit as the first step. A very close connection exists between what subjects are, and how we are to know them. Those researchers who place the subjects in the minds of the users have a conception of ‘subject’ different to that possessed by those who regard the subject as a fixed property of the documents. The key to the definition of the concept of ‘subject’ lies in the epistemological investigation of how we are going to know what we need to know about documents in order to describe them in a way which facilitates information retrieval. The second step therefore is an analysis of the implicit epistemological conceptions in the major existing conceptions of ‘subject’. The different conceptions of ‘subject’ can therefore be classified into epistemological positions, e.g. ‘subjective idealism’ (or the empiric/positivistic viewpoint), ‘objective idealism’ (the rationalistic viewpoint), ‘pragmatism’ and ‘materialism/ realism’. The third and final step is to propose a new theory of subject matter based on an explicit theory of knowledge. In this article this is done from the point of view of a realistic/materialistic epistemology. From this standpoint the subject of a document is defined as the epistemological potentials of that document.

The paper discusses the consistency of fiction indexing of library professionals and patrons based on an empirical test. Indexing was carried out with a Finnish fictional thesaurus and all of the test persons indexed the same five novels. The consistency of indexing was determined to be low; several reasons are postulated. Also an algorithm for typified indexing of fiction is given as well as some suggestions for the development of fiction information retrieval systems and content representation.

The paper analyses the development of LIS research in Denmark since 1985, when research became one of the main activities of the Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS) along with education and continuing education. The paper outlines the background for the development of the School from a professional school to a university institution and the political, economic, professional and other conditions for this framework. The initiatives taken and the activities realised during the years are evaluated, especially those with relevance to international co‐operation.