Chapter 2: Searching

2.6 Item records

Once you’ve done a search, the finding tool will generate a list of brief item records. Item records are descriptions of individual books, journal articles, and other materials. Important parts of an item record include things like article title, author, and the source name (e.g. journal title). Each of these parts is a field. Some article indexes label each field; others don’t, assuming that you can infer what each part represents.

Typically, subject focused indexes display short versions of item records in search results lists, as in the example below. Important parts of the item description are included, but most fields are not labeled in this short version.

 

Short version of an item record from a database. It shows it is from an academic journal and provides the title, authors, title, year, volume, issue, pages, article length, and subjects. Beneath this information are links to the HTML full text and the PDF full text.
Figure 3.9 Short item record showing a few fields, but not the full item description

Clicking on the title generally brings up a detailed version of the record with a lot more information, including additional fields, labels for most of the fields, and often an abstract or link to the full text.

A longer version of an item record from a database is called the detailed record. It gives more information about the authors, including links to click if you want more of their work, article and journal titles, year, volume, issue, pages, article length, and linked subjects, and an abstract. To the left are links to the HTML full text and the PDF full text.
Figure 3.10 Item record with more information about the article

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LIN 175: Information Literacy Copyright © 2022 by Steely Library Education & Outreach Services, Northern Kentucky University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.