Consistency of subject indexing of novels by public library professionals and patrons

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.