Glossary

Abstract: A brief summary of a longer work.   

Annotation:  A brief summary or comment on a longer work.   If you are asked to do an annotated bibliography, you must cite and briefly describe each item that you read.

Author:  The person who wrote the book, article, or other reading material

Bibliography:  A list of books, magazine articles and/or other sources on a given topic.  Bibliographies must be given in a specific order as specified by a style manual.

bt:  broader term.  Example:  dog is a broader term for  poodle. 

Catalog:  A list.  Library catalogs list all the materials that the Library  owns.  Library catalogs can be found as computer databases, or as card catalogs, or occasionally, as book catalogs. 

Citation: The information needed to identify and find an information source.  

Citing : When you write a research paper, you must tell where you found your information.   
You do this by making a footnote or endnote or parenthetical reference, or by describing your information source in the body of your paper.  See  references.

Database: an organized list that can be searched by category.   Library databases usually put each element of a citation in a separate searchable field (category).   Library databases typically contain a collection of magazine, newspaper or reference book articles.

Directory: A hierarchical arrangement of Web sites, according to their subject area.
Example: Yahoo is a directory.  It also contains a search engine (see search engines) 

Editor:  The person who selects material for publication, or the person who reads it carefully, checks the facts, corrects errors, and works with the author to improve the quality of the written work before publication. 

Field:  A category in a database. 

Fielded search:  Searching within a field (category) of a database.

Full-text:  If an article in a computer database is full text, the entire article is there. 

Hierarchy: An ordering of terms indicating degree of generality or specificity. Example, in order of increasing generality:

Standard Poodle
Poodle
Dog
Mammal
Animal

Hits:  The results of a search.  Every time a search retrieves results, each item retrieved is called a "hit"

http: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

html: Hypertext markup language

Index: An alphabetical list that leads to more information.   An easy example of an index would be a telephone book; looking up a name gives you the address and phone number.   Today, indexes can be found in book form or on computer databases. 

Index only:  If a database is indexing only, it is NOT full-text. 

Journal: A periodical, or magazine.  Some people use the term "journal" to indicate scholarly content. 

Keyword : The term that is being searched for is called a keyword. 

Magazine:  A periodical.  Some people use the term "magazine" to indicate a popular, rather than a scholarly, publication.

nt : narrower term.  Example: poodle is a narrower term for dog. 

Online Journal:  A journal that is published electronically (on the web) rather than printed on paper.   Some online journals are available in either print or electronic  format; others are published only on the web. 

Periodical:  Something which is published periodically, at regular or irregular intervals.  Magazines  and newspapers are examples of periodicals. 

Phrase:  Two or more words together make a phrase.

Proximity Indicator:  In Boolean searching, proximity (closeness) between two words can be shown with a proximity indicator, usually w/n , where  w means within and n is the number of words.  Example:  George w/2 Bush indicates that George must be within two words of Bush. 

Query:  Another word for  search.  To query a database is to search it for specified items. 

Reference Books:  Books in which the content is organized alphabetically, so that you can look up the exact part of the information that you need.  Reference books are usually not read straight through, but are referred to as needed. Examples would include both general and specialized encyclopedias, indexes,  dictionaries, almanacs, collections of statistics, books of quotations, statistics, etc.

Reference Section:  In a library, there is usually a collection of books that does not circulate (You cannot check them out).   These are the Reference Books.  Increasingly, a great deal of Reference information is available in computer databases.  This would be called Electronic Reference. 

References:  When writing a paper, you must tell where you got your information by making references (description,  footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical).  At the end of your paper, you will have a list of references, sometimes called Works Cited or Bibliography.  See also citation.  

Reserves:  When the library anticipates that certain materials will be heavily used, the materials are placed on Reserve. Such  materials are checked out for a very short time, usually for use only in the library, to ensure that all library patrons have an opportunity to use them. 

Source: The publication where information was found.  Source is sometimes used to mean the title of the magazine, as opposed to the title of the article. 

Search Engine:  On the Internet, a large computer that retains a large memory of files for the purpose of making them available to remote users.  When you search for terms on a search engine, it will retrieve a list of links where the terms you sought can be found.  

Synonyms:  Two words that mean the same thing are called synonyms. 

Title: The name of the book,  article, or web site.

Truncation:  A shortening of a word indicated by a wildcard symbol, such as *, ?, or !. The symbol is used to indicate that the word could have many possible endings.   Smith* will pick up Smith, Smiths, Smithson, Smithsonian, Smithfield, Smithers, smithy, etc.

URL: Universal Resource Locator, or web address.  Usually starts with http://www.

Web posting: a document which is found on the web, but is not part of an online journal or book.

www: World Wide Web (the Internet, in the format that supports  pictures)