Record
The term record has many meanings. In archives the term refer to documents (hence the term record management). In Library and Information Science the term refer mostly to bibliographical records, i.e., document representations in catalogs, bibliographies and databases.
"Record.
A collection of related data, arranged in fields and treated as a unit. The data
for each article in a database make up a record. The complete information for
each item in the UMD Library Catalog is also a record." (UMD, 2004).
Bibliographical records vary from database to database. Below is given an example of a record from the Social SciSearch on Dialog (which have more information than is common in bibliographic databases).
SAMPLE RECORD:
1 DIALOG(R)File
7:Social SciSearch(R)
2 (c) 2005 Inst for Sci Info. All rts. reserv.
3
4 04121582 Genuine Article#: 870US Number of
References: 17
5 Title: Characteristics of scientific web publications:
Preliminary data
6 gathering and analysis
7 Author(s): Jepsen ET (REPRINT); Seiden P; Ingwersen P; Bjorneborn
L
8 Corporate Source: Royal Sch Lib & Informat Sci,Dept Informat
Studies,Birketinget 6/DK-2300 Copenhagen S//Denmark/ (REPRINT);
Royal
Sch Lib & Informat Sci,Dept Informat Studies,DK-2300
Copenhagen
S//Denmark/; Royal Sch Lib & Informat Sci,Dept Informat
Studies,DK-9000
Aalborg//Denmark/(etj@db.dk; ps@db.dk; pi@db.dk; lb@db.dk)
13 Journal: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY, 2004, V55, N14 (DEC), P1239-1249
15 Publisher: JOHN WILEY & SONS INC, 111 RIVER ST, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030 USA
16 Language: English Document Type: Article
17 Subfile: SciSearch
18 Journal Subject Category: INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE
19 Abstract: Because of the increasing presence of scientific publications on
the Web, combined with the existing difficulties in easily
verifying
and retrieving these publications, research on techniques and
methods
for retrieval of scientific Web publications is called for.
In this
article, we report on the initial steps taken toward the
construction
of a test collection of scientific Web publications within
the subject
domain of plant biology. The steps reported are those of data
gathering
and data analysis aiming at identifying characteristics of
scientific
Web publications. The data used in this article were
generated based on
specifically selected domain topics that are searched for in
three
publicly accessible search engines (Google, AllTheWeb, and
AltaVista).
A sample of the retrieved hits was analyzed with regard to
how various
publication attributes correlated with the scientific quality
of the
content and whether this information could be employed to
harvest,
filter, and rank Web publications. The attributes analyzed
were
inlinks, outlinks, bibliographic references, file format,
language,
search engine overlap, structural position (according to site
structure), and the occurrence of various types of metadata.
As could
be expected, the ranked output differs between the three
search
engines. Apparently, this is caused by differences in ranking
algorithms rather than the databases themselves. In fact,
because
scientific Web content in this subject domain receives few
inlinks,
both AltaVista and AllTheWeb retrieved a higher degree of
accessible
scientific content than Google. Because of the search engine
cutoffs of
accessible URLs, the feasibility of using search engine
output for Web
content analysis is also discussed.
45 Identifiers--KeyWord Plus(R): WORLD-WIDE-WEB; INFORMATION; PERSPECTIVES;
WEBOMETRICS; SCIENCE
47 Cited References:
ALLEN ES, 1999, V402, P722, NATURE
ALMIND TC, 1997, V53, P404, J DOC
BARILAN J, 2001, V50, P7, SCIENTOMETRICS
BJORNEBORN L, 2001, V50, P65, SCIENTOMETRICS
CRONIN B, 1996, V52, P163, J DOC
DROTT MC, 2002, V38, P209, INFORM PROCESS MANAG
GILES CL, 1998, P89, DIGITAL LIB 98
INGWERSEN P, 1994, P101, P 17 ANN INT ACM SIG
INGWERSEN P, 1996, V52, P3, J DOC
INGWERSEN P, 1992, INFORMATION RETRIEVA
KLEINBERG J, 1999, V31, ACM COMPUTING SURVEY
LAWRENCE S, 1999, V32, P67, IEEE COMPUT
LAWRENCE S, 1999, P139, 8 INT C INF KNOWL MA
LAWRENCE S, 1999, V400, P107, NATURE
ROBERTSON SE, 1981, P9, INFORMATION RETRIEVA
SPARCK J, 1976, V32, P59, J DOC
64 THELWALL M, 2003, V59, P205, J DOC
The elements in the record above:
Line 1 Database host (Dialog) and Database (Social SciSearch).
Line 2 Copyright information from database producer (ISI).
Line 4: Accession number. The records number in the database.
Line 4: Article number for ordering article from ISI
Line 4: Number of references (corresponding to the references listed line 48-64).
Line 5-6: Title of article indexed (titles are only in English. Foreign languages titles are translated by the database producer).
Line 7: Authors of article indexed. (First names are abbreviated to one letter; Swedish ö, like Danish ø is replaced by o).
Line 8-12: The institutes at which the authors work + full postal addresses + email for each author.
Line 13-14: Name of journal, year, volume, issue, (month) and pages for the article indexed
Line 15 Name and address of publisher of the journal
Line 16: Language of article indexed. (Click here for language codes and frequencies in the database)
Line 16: Document type ( See
Document typology for document types and
frequencies in this database).
Line 17:
Sub file SciSearch indicates that this journal is also indexed in
another database from ISI and that the record has been imported to Social
SciSearch from SciSearch.
Line 18: Journal Subject Category. This is a subject category for journals (here JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY). In this database are single articles not given manual subject categories.
Line 19-44: Abstract of the article indexed. In this database are the abstracts identical with the ones provided by the authors in the article (cut and paste).
Line 45-46: KeyWord Plus(R) are keywords automatically assigned by an algorithm based on title-word in cited papers.
Line 47-64 lists the references that are cited in the article indexed. Each of these references can be used as access points in searches. It is important to notice that the references are represented in a shorted form, that they are incomplete and not standardized.
Another example: Catalog record from The Royal Danish Military Library (RDML): Catalog record from RDML (With abstracts written by the library staff).
The information provided by a record determine the objective possibilities for information retrieval for both humans and computers (you cannot search something that is not in the record, nor can an algorithm). You may not know what possibilities exist and hence not be able to utilize the objective possibilities: That determines your subjective possibilities for IR.
Literature:
Dunsire, G.
(2003). Integrating Dublin Core/RDF records with MARC21 via the OCLC Connexion
service at the Centre for Digital Library Research. Zeitschrift für
Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, 50(4), 188-192. (Article in English).
O'Neill, E. T. (2002). FRBR: Functional requirements for bibliographic records - Application of the entity-relationship model to Humphry Clinker. Library Resources & Technical Services, 46(4), 150-159.
Taniguchi, S. (2005). Recording evidence in bibliographic records and descriptive metadata. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(8), 872-882.
UMD (2004). The University of Minnesota . http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/reference/skills/vocab.html#R
Wadham, R. L. (2004). Multipart monographic series of fiction and the bibliographic record. Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services, 28(2), 224-238.
Wilson, P. (1979). On the use of records of research. Library Quarterly, 49(2), 127-145.
See also Project register;
Record (Lifeboat for KO)
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 18-05-2006