10. Full Text Databases: Their Implications for Librarians

Date01 May 1986
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/eb054894
Pages48-50
Published date01 May 1986
AuthorMichael Berrington
Subject MatterLibrary & information science
10.
Full-Text Databases:
Their Implications for
Librarians
by Michael Berrington
LM
7,5
Introduction
Full-text databases, the subject of this article, are worthy of consideration for
a
number of
reasons. They are unique in allowing online access to primary textual information. The
amount and scope of that information is expanding rapidly. The impact they will have on
searching techniques and document delivery is considerable. In fact, it seems they will
become central to information provision within only a few more years. Before examining
these points in detail, it is helpful to outline their development and, in particular, their
relationship to bibliographic databases.
Computers were first used to improve the secondary control of books and journals, by
speeding up the production of printed abstracts and indexes. This obviously involved
putting the references on to computers and so it soon became possible to interrogate the
files,
which had built up over
a
number of
years,
while they were still in the computer. Then
it would have
seemed
unlikely that computers could hold not the references but the full text
of material
itself.
However, recent advances in computer storage, and the electronic
production of text, have made this possible. Today, databases form two distinct types,
reference or bibliographic and source or full-text. This arrangement will remain; the source
database is an extra resource, not a successor, to the bibliographic database whose
function remains to act as a guide to the literature of a given subject, each file covering
hundreds of primary sources with the briefest locating details.
Information Available, Subject and Types
The information available has grown so rapidly that the breadth of subjects covered is now
nearly as great as with bibliographic databases. The types of printed publications now
online are comprehensive; complete texts of books, journals, encyclopedias, directories
and newspapers are now searchable. Of course, none of these files goes back very far in
time;
five years is good, but as retrospective searching is uncommon with full-text, this is
unlikely to matter. When examining the information available it is possible to look at it
subject by subject. However, I think it is more helpful to outline it briefly by type of
publication, as this way their characteristics and potential can be best analysed. First is the
category of books, encyclopedias and directories. These appear to be the ultimate in
full-
text, yet at the moment they are least perfect of all the types.
They are, after
all,
dependent on electronic publishing other methods of inputting the
text would be far too expensive and until technology will allow the pictures and dia-
grams, etc, to be stored
with,
or accessed parallel to the text, they will never be complete.
The range of titles which will go electronic is likely to be limited to highly specialised,
expensive-to-produce, frequently-updated titles. Finding information in them
is,
of course,
going to be easier than using a book index. It
is
also going to be more current, and the data
found in directories will be amenable to manipulation before they are finally printed out.
48

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