Global InformationUniterm information
Uniterm is a subject indexing system introduced by Mortimer Taube in 1951. The name is a contraction of "unit" and "term", referring to its use of single words as the basis of the index, the "uniterms". Taube referred to the overall concept as "Coordinate Indexing", but today the entire concept is generally referred to as Uniterm as well.
Uniterm is designed to allow rapid lookups on topic keywords and then cross-reference those keywords across multiple topics in order to find documents that match all of the terms. The result of a uniterm search is a set of accession numbers that can then be used to retrieve the matching documents. Uniterm is based on existing accession numbers, so it is technically a post-coordinate system. This is opposed to a pre-coordinate system, where the subject of the document results it being given a particular number, as in the Dewey Decimal Classification. Uniterm was among the most popular post-coordinate indexing systems, although some of its success was due to Taube's company winning contracts to index huge technical libraries.