Literary warrant and guidelines for the construction of controlled vocabularies

Abstract

The principle of literary warrant was stated by Hulme in 1911 almost a hundred years ago. Since then, it has evolved slowly but steadily to become one of the basic and unquestionable foundations of knowledge organization for information retrieval. Though originally formulated as a methodological criterion to legitimate the inclusion of terms or classes in classification systems, various authors have broadened the scope of the principle with concepts such as user warrant, cultural warrant and organizational warrant. It is, therefore, stated at present that the literary warrant is not only literature-based, but also based upon experts’ opinions and users’ requirements, as well as culturally determined. The treatment of the literary warrant in classification systems and in the United States and English guidelines for the construction of controlled vocabularies and other concept structures – published in 2005 – are reviewed and discussed in this paper. Methodological criteria for a useful application are suggested.