Indexation is one of the activities carried out in libraries for the thematic organization of information. Through this activity, librarians extract subjects from documents to represent them thematically, in this way, the users have access to the desired document through the information retrieval. Considering that the indexation evaluation is essential to provide more quality to its process, and to allow an efficient retrieval of information for users, it is proposed to conduct the evaluation of the quality of the indexation made in the documents of the Biological, Human, and Engineering Sciences areas from UFPA libraries, in the completeness and specificity aspects, through the information retrieval in the online catalog by the recall and precision elements, from the users’ point of view. This research aimed at contributing with theoretical and practical subsidies for the area of Thematic Processing of Data, based on a research on the evaluation of the quality of indexation, through the elements of completeness and specificity for the information retrieval recall and accuracy. The specific objectives were: a) To reflect on the indexation issue: theoretical and conceptual aspects, purposes, stages, instruments, as well as the inherent factors of its policy and evaluation by the information retrieval; b) To obtain a relevant judgment and opinions on the documents retrieved in the search of a subject in the catalog of the library system of UFPA, through the application of interviews with users of three undergraduate courses, in Belém campus; c) To check the levels of completeness and specificity in the indexation from the recall rates and accuracy in the information retrieval, in order to evaluate the quality of the indexation carried out in a total of 2.584 documents. As a methodological procedure, it was applied a semi-structured interview with 55 users of the UFPA library system, who were undergraduate students from the Biology, Psychology and Civil Engineering courses, in Belém campus, representing respectively the Biological, Human Sciences and Engineering Sciences areas. For the data analysis the quality of the indexation, it was used the categories of completeness and specificity, referring to the indexing process, and of recall and precision, which are regarding the information retrieval by subject. The results showed that the indexation of the analyzed documents of the three courses was considered satisfactory, mainly in the Biology course, in which a higher quality of the indexation was verified, since relevant documents were recovered with few irrelevant ones. However, for a higher quality in the courses of Psychology and Civil Engineering, it is necessary to elaborate guidelines for the indexation and to fix them in an indexation policy. It is concluded that evaluating the indexation through the information retrieval, including the subjects that belong to the documentary cycle, it becomes essential when seeking improvements for the process, since they can improve the representation and information retrieval through their feedback, showing what is desired for each specific area of the documents treated, as well as allowing the adequacy of the indexing according to the context of each library.
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