Subject access

[William Meredith <wmered@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fellow ARSCLIS members,
I recently posted a message to this list and I want to thank those who
responded to me. I am the MLIS student working on the proposals for
creating a university radio broadcast archive.
I have a related paper due in 7 days (Feb 17th). The title will be
something like: "Issues in, and Approaches to, Facilitating Subject Access
to Spoken Word Archives". I will talk about thesauri and abstracting. The
stack of articles and books that I have are too general to be happy with. I
will stumble through, but at the risk of coming across as lazy, I am
appealing to those of you with spoken word collections for input. I have a
few questions about how you manage to provide subject access:
1. Do you use a thesaurus to fill in a subject-heading field? If so, how
many headings do you generally give to pieces?
2. Do you abstract spoken word pieces? If so can you give me any insight
into how? What do you keep in mind in writing the abstracts? I am not sure
what I expect you to say about this, but then I have never worked in that
milieu.
Thank you all for your time.
William Meredith