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Well, I’ve been
introducing an awful lot of vocabulary through these first ten slides. Remember that Walker and Janes has a pretty
nice glossary. The existence of a
basic index versus additional indexes is extremely important for searchers to
understand. From a searchers
perspective, whenever you search a database without specifying a particular
field to search, the basic index is searched.
It’s kind of a default instruction for computer to follow. It’s also VERY important to realize that
the basic index in one database can be different from the basic index in another
database. To complicate matters even
further, a database that you’ll find on the DIALOG service might also be
found in EBSCOHost or FirstSearch.
Even though they host some of the same databases, they may choose to
index them in different ways.
Sometimes a database host might choose to leave certain fields
completely out of the indexing process.
The important lesson to learn here would be that the savvy librarian
must be ready for anything and should endeavor to find out what is defined as
the basic index and which additional indexes exist for all the databases that
they search. Thankfully you don’t have
to memorize all that junk! You just
need to know how to look up this information and how to best articulate the
situation to your end users. We’ll
learn about how to do this with Dialog and that will provide you with a very
good example for the future.
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