A library classification is a system used within a library to organize materials, including books, sound and video recordings, electronic materials, etc., both on shelves and in catalogs and indexes. Each item is typically assigned a call number, which identifies the location of the item within the system. Materials can be arrange by many different factors, typically in either a hierarchical tree structure based on the subject or using a faceted classification system, which allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in many ways.
This page is a glossary of library and information science.
DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since November 2018, DBLP is a branch of Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (LZI). DBLP listed more than 5.4 million journal articles, conference papers, and other publications on computer science in December 2020, up from about 14,000 in 1995 and 3.66 million in July 2016. All important journals on computer science are tracked. Proceedings papers of many conferences are also tracked. It is mirrored at three sites across the Internet.
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a digital library portal for researchers on astronomy and physics, operated for NASA by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing over 20 million records, including all arXiv e-prints. Abstracts and full-text of major astronomy and physics publications are indexed and searchable through the portal.
A faceted classification is a classification scheme used in organizing knowledge into a systematic order. A faceted classification uses semantic categories, either general or subject-specific, that are combined to create the full classification entry. Many library classification systems use a combination of a fixed, enumerative taxonomy of concepts with subordinate facets that further refine the topic.
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions, in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database. The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services. WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public.
Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, preferred terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.
The Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), also known as Arts and Humanities Search, is a citation index, with abstracting and indexing for more than 1,700 arts and humanities academic journals, and coverage of disciplines that includes social and natural science journals. Part of this database is derived from Current Contents.
MathSciNet is a searchable online bibliographic database created by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. It contains all of the contents of the journal Mathematical Reviews (MR) since 1940 along with an extensive author database, links to other MR entries, citations, full journal entries, and links to original articles. It contains almost 3.6 million items and over 2.3 million links to original articles.
In library and information science, cataloging (US) or cataloguing (UK) is the process of creating metadata representing information resources, such as books, sound recordings, moving images, etc. Cataloging provides information such as author's names, titles, and subject terms that describe resources, typically through the creation of bibliographic records. The records serve as surrogates for the stored information resources. Since the 1970s these metadata are in machine-readable form and are indexed by information retrieval tools, such as bibliographic databases or search engines. While typically the cataloging process results in the production of library catalogs, it also produces other types of discovery tools for documents and collections.
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts was a division of Cambridge Information Group and provider of online databases, based in Bethesda, Maryland, before merging with ProQuest of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2007. CSA hosted databases of abstracts and developed taxonomic indexing of scholarly articles. These databases were hosted on the CSA Illumina platform and were available alongside add-on products like CSA Illustrata. The company produced numerous bibliographic databases in different fields of the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and technology. Thus, coverage included materials science, environmental sciences and pollution management, biological sciences, aquatic sciences and fisheries, biotechnology, engineering, computer science, sociology, linguistics, and other areas.
Inspec is a major indexing database of scientific and technical literature, published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and formerly by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), one of the IET's forerunners.
Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it is about identifying and describing the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents within a field of knowledge.
The Linguistic Bibliography / Bibliographie Linguistique is an annual publication which first appeared in 1949. The publication provides comprehensive bibliographical descriptions of publications in theoretical linguistics, with about 20,000 items added per year. Since 2002, the database has also been available online, as Linguistic Bibliography Online, and contains data from 1993 onward.
Africa Bibliography is an annual guide to works in African studies published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute (IAI). It was established in 1984 and is published as an annual print volume and simultaneously as a searchable online database. The online database consolidates the back volumes of the Africa Bibliography into a single database which can be queried using quick search, Boolean, and faceted search options. Items included are monographs, chapters in edited volumes, journal articles, and pamphlets. Languages included are English, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Swahili, Spanish, and Afrikaans. Subject areas covered are the social and environmental sciences, humanities and the arts, alongside some items from medical, biological, and natural sciences. Every entry in the bibliography is categorised by region, country, and subject and newer entries are tagged with additional keywords. As an annual publication, it records the previous year's published work in its field, with provision for retrospective inclusion of earlier items.
Academic Search is a monthly indexing service. It was first published in 1997 by EBSCO Publishing in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Its academic focus is international universities, covering social science, education, psychology, and other subjects. Publishing formats covered are academic journals, magazines, newspapers, and CD-ROM.
CiNii is a bibliographic database service for material in Japanese academic libraries, especially focusing on Japanese works and English works published in Japan. An early trial version of the database was a component of its predecessor called GeNii, available online at least since June 2002. A complete version of CiNii has been available since April 2005. The service searches from within the databases maintained by the NII itself, as well as the databases provided by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (J-STAGE), the National Diet Library of Japan, institutional repositories, and other organizations.
The Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD), formerly part of the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) and for some years renamed Kinetica, is a national shared library cataloguing network, hosted by the National Library of Australia. It commenced in 1981 in Australia as the ABN, and after a series of rebrandings and added services, has since 2006 been available through Libraries Australia. In mid-2019, Libraries Australia partnered with Trove, and as of June 2020 is set to be co-branded with Trove.
The British National Bibliography (BNB) was established at the British Museum in 1949 to publish a list of the books, journals and serials that are published in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. It also includes information on forthcoming titles. This is the single most comprehensive listing of UK titles. UK and Irish publishers are obliged by legal deposit to send a copy of all new publications, including serial titles, to the BNB for listing. The BNB publishes the list weekly in electronic form: the last printed weekly list appeared in December 2011.
