Automatic keywording of High Energy Physics

Bibliographic databases were developed from the traditional library card catalogue in order to enable users to access library documents via various types of bibliographic information, such as title, author, series or conference date. In addition these catalogues sometimes contained some form of indexation by subject, such as the Universal (or Dewey) Decimal Classification used for books. With the introduction of the eprint archives, set up by the High Energy Physics (HEP) Community in the early 90s, huge collections of documents in several fields have been made available on the World Wide Web. These developments however have not yet been followed up from a keywording point of view. We will see in this paper how important it is to attribute keywords to all documents in the area of HEP Grey Literature. As libraries are facing a future with less and less manpower available and more and more documents, we will explore the possibility of being helped by automatic classification software. We will specifically mention a project being carried out at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) for testing this automatic keywording.