PRECIS [ELIS Classic]

Derek Austin’s PRECIS, or PREserved Context Index System, was one of the most sophisticated indexing systems ever developed for text. Austin noted that there are many ways that the meaning of index entries may be misread and misunderstood, if the original context from which the concept came was not present. Drawing on a good understanding of linguistics, Austin and his colleagues developed a highly rigorous, yet not impossibly difficult, set of principles to use in indexing with the help of PRECIS. The system was particularly valuable for generating multiple word orderings of entries that still retained their proper contextual meaning. Much of the need for this feature was obviated by the development of powerful full text searching in information systems, however, and PRECIS receded from view in information science. The final sections of the article that address the details of coding and indexing management are deleted from the text below.—ELIS Classic, from 1987