Page 53 - DLIS408_INFORMATION_TECHNOLOGY-APPLICATIONSL SCIENCES

Information Technology and Application

Notes either locally or remotely. They may include access to a particular organisation’s database covering
transactions and financial records, or to other databases that might be accessed remotely. Some of
these databases may hold publicly accessible information such as abstracting and indexing databases,
full texts of reports or directories, etc., on the other hand, their might be databases which are
shared within an organisation or group of organisations.

Did u know? Databases available to information users in the public domain and which
might be accessed remotely or online via some online search services, or
locally on CD-ROM, can be categorised as Reference or Source databases.

Reference databases direct the user to another source where the information sought by the user is
available. This might be a document, an organisation or an individual. Some of the examples
include: bibliographic databases, catalogue databases and referral databases. Let us try to know
what these categories of databases are.

Catalogue Databases

These types of databases indicate the collection of a given library or a group of libraries Constituting
a library network. These databases list the type of collection, namely, monographs, journal titles
and other items possessed by the library. They merely provide citations to the documents along
with their call numbers to enable easy location of the documents.

Referral Databases
This type of databases offers references to information or data such as names and addresses of
organisations, and other directory type of data.
It may be mentioned here that source databases contain the original source data, and are considered
as one type of electronic document. After successful consultation of a source database, the user
should have the information that is required by him and should not need to seek information in
another original source. Source databases may be categorised into:
numeric databases, which contain numerical data of different types such as statistics and
survey data;
full text databases of news paper items, technical specifications and computer software;
hybrid databases which contain a mixture of textual and numeric data;
multi-media databases, which include information stored in a mixture of different types of
media including sound, video, pictures, text and animation.

Bibliographic Databases

These types of databases contain citations or bibliographic references sometimes along with brief
abstracts of literature. They indicate to the user the content of the full text, the source where it can
be located (e.g., journal title, conference proceedings) and whether they contain mere citations or
provide abstracts or summaries of the original documents covered.

Bibliographic databases, contain a series of bibliographic records, with each record containing
some combination of the under mentioned components:
document number
author
title
source reference

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