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ABSTRACT
Julius Otto Kaiser (1968-1927) was a special librarian and indexer who, at the turn of the twentieth century, designed an innovative, category-based indexing system known as "systematic indexing." Although he is regarded as a pioneer of indexing and classification, little is known about his life. This essay seeks to fill in some gaps in Kaiser's biography by reviewing what is known of his life prior to his entry into information work: namely, his birth, childhood, and education in Germany; his early career as a musician and teacher in Australia; and his sojourn as a teacher in Chile. It is argued that Kaiser's early experiences equipped him with linguistic skills and a commercial outlook that smoothed his path into the world of business information and left traces in his thought about indexing and information work.
Introduction
Julius Otto Kaiser (1868-1927) was a special librarian and indexer active in the United States and Great Britain in the final half-decade of the nine- teenth centur y and the first two-and-half decades of the twentieth centur y. To present-day students of classification and indexing, he is known as the creator of an innovative system of alphabetical subject indexing, which he named "systematic indexing" (SI) (Kaiser, 1911, 1926). Designing SI to facilitate the indexing, on cards, of individual items of information em- bedded within journal articles and other documentar y units of commer- cial and technical literature, he based it on two methodological precepts: namely that (1) all the index terms in an indexing vocabular y are to be assigned to one of three general classes of terms-terms for concretes, terms for countries, and terms for processes-and, (2) once sorted into these classes, terms should be combined, by means of stringent syntactic rules, into compound index terms, or "statements," formulated in such a way that a term for a concrete or a countr y always precedes a term for a process (Kaiser, 1911, §§ 21, 73, 302, 305, 574; Svenonius, 1978, 138; 2000, pp. 6, 173-174). These two precepts have come to form the basis for the present-day valorization of SI as a historically significant indexing system and Kaiser as a pioneer of subject indexing. Some latter-day commentators have lauded him as the first writer on indexing to...