· Library Catalog: A list of inventory of all the materials within a specific collection or at a particular location.
(Davidson College’s Library Jargon, http://www.davidson.edu/administrative/library/refer/jargon.asp, 2007.)
· Brief Record: When you first do a search for a book or database, the list of results are brief records. Here it gives partial information on the book such as the author, title, and call number. If you click on these brief records you can then view the full record.
· Full Record: The collection of information about an item listed in a database. For example, a record for a journal article will contain citation information (author, title, journal title, publication information, volume number, date, page numbers) as well as subject headings, an abstract, and other information. A record in the Library Catalog contains citation information as well as subject headings, a call number, and information about the item’s status.
(Davidson College’s Library Jargon, http://www.davidson.edu/administrative/library/refer/jargon.asp, 2007.)
· Subject Headings: A word, phrase, or group of words that describes the subject content of a book or other item. In most databases, subject headings, which can also be called “descriptors,” are a form of controlled vocabulary. A given item may have more than one subject heading.
(Davidson College’s Library Jargon, http://www.davidson.edu/administrative/library/refer/jargon.asp, 2007.)
· Library of Congress Classification: a system for classifying books and other materials, using for its notation both letters and numerals to allow for expansion: originally developed at the Library of Congress for classifying its books and subsequently adopted by other libraries.
(Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.)
· Dewey Decimal Classification: a system of classifying books and other works into ten main classes of knowledge with further subdivision in these classes by use of the numbers of a decimal system: devised by Melvil Dewey, published in 1876, and used in many libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere.
(Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.)
· PURL (related to the acronym URL): A PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client. The client can then complete the URL transaction in the normal fashion. In Web parlance, this is a standard HTTP redirect.
(A Project of OCLC Research, http://purl.org/, 2008.)
