Abstract
The long history of keywords and their predecessors as semiotic, symbolic, and semantic pointers to key concepts over time is introduced. This chapter describes current findings on four sensory specifics that are generally not considered as being aspects of library and information science but that are keywords which ground the discipline both physically and conceptually: that is, vision for representation, voice for reference, hearing for relevance, and memory for retention.
Like many of the words that matter most, that tell us most about our intellectual and material life and about our cognitive and perceptual habits, ‘keyword’ hides in plain view. —Michael Leja, “Keyword” (2009)
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Martens, B.V.d.V. (2023). Representation, Reference, Relevance, and Retention. In: Keywords In and Out of Context . Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32530-4_1
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