Glossary of Terms

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A

Alert: A Zetoc Alert is a means to set up regular searches of the Zetoc database for new records that match your search criteria. You can set up alerts for journal titles and also for keywords from article titles and authors' names. You will receive emails when new data comes into the database that matches your search criteria.
Alternative title: Alternatives to the main title of the conference are held in this field.
Article title: The article title can be searched on Zetoc by entering the complete title or keywords from the title. The article title is a facsimile of the entry in the table of contents of the journal or conference.
Article: A discrete item from a journal publication.
Author(s): The name, surname and initials of the author(s) responsible for writing the article or paper.

BLDSC shelfmark: The unique 10 character code allocated to each publication which identifies the item and the stock location at the British Library Document Supply Centre.
Boolean: A system devised by George Boole for applying mathematics-like procedures to logic. It uses expressions, (an expression is a mathematical statement, such as 1+1=2) built up from propositions, and the logical operations "and", "or", "not". Each expression can be "evaluated" as "True" or "False".

COinS: OpenURL ContextObject in SPAN, this is a convention to embed bibliographic metadata in HTML and provides a means to allow different processing agents to process and make use of the metadata. See the COinS website
Conference date: The date, month and year when the conference took place.
Conference proceedings: The collection of papers given at a particular conference.
Conference sponsor: The body/organisation responsible for initiating/holding the conference.
Conference title: The full title of the conference, with descriptor. e.g. "Medical imaging 2006: image processing."
Conference venue: The place, town or city, and country where the conference was held.
Copac: Copac is a union catalogue. It provides free access to the merged online catalogues of university research libraries in the UK and Ireland plus the British Library and the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland.
Country of publication: This indicates the country of publication for each journal or conference.

Default: Pre-set choices that will apply unless you override them.
Dewey class number: The Dewey classification number, a system of library classification. All journal titles on Zetoc have a Dewey class number to identify the subject area.

Federated Access: Federated Access (e.g. Shibboleth) allows users to securely access external services using the same username and password as they do for local pages at their institution. More information can be found on the Mimas service access pages:
http://www.mimas.ac.uk/access/#federated-access.

Institutional Login: A login provided by an institution to allow its users to access various resources, such as Zetoc.
Interlibrary Loan (ILL): A library service which takes requests for materials held at other libraries. Also referred to in many libraries as Document Supply.
ISBN: International Standard Book Number - a unique identifier consisting of a 10 digit code allocated to the publication.
ISSN: International Standard Serial Number - a unique identifier consisting of an 8 digit code allocated to a print or electronic periodical publication.

Jisc: The Joint Information Systems Committee, which supports Further and Higher education in online teaching, learning and research.

Keywords: Terms assigned to conferences by the British Library. Keywords are not assigned to journal articles.

Language: The language in which the article is published. Zetoc includes journals in a wide range of languages as well as English, including French, Spanish, Italian and Greek.
LC class number: The classification number allocated to journals by the Library of Congress.

Material type identifier: The format of the item - review, papers, summaries, preprints etc. Applies to conference papers only.
Material type: The form of publication of the item - serials or conferences.
Medium: The physical properties of the item. Applies to journal articles only. Zetoc has defined this as 4 options: hardcopy i.e. paper based, microform - microfilm and microfiche and electronic storage.

OpenURL: A type of URL that contains metadata about a resource. In Zetoc an OpenURL contains metadata about an article title. This can be used to link to an OpenURL Resolver at an institution, which can provide links to the full text of an article where the user has access rights.

Pagination: The start and end pages are given, separated by a hyphen e.g. 20-25.
Paper: A conference paper
Proceedings (Conference): The collection of papers given at a particular conference.
Publication frequency: The number of issues per year, usually weekly, fortnightly, monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly, and may use a number range, such as 9-14 issues per year
Publisher: The name of the publisher of a journal, usually with the country of publication.

Record: Bibliographic details identifying a particular journal article or conference paper.
RSS: Zetoc has RSS feeds of journals that users can subscribe to, providing users with a way to access journal article information. Typically, you use software that checks RSS feeds and displays updated content. See About Zetoc RSS

Serial: A regular compilation of articles on a defined subject. See also Journal.

Stopwords

Words that are so common that they result in too many records being retrieved, e.g. a, an, and, for, of, or, the.

Volume/issue/part number: Details the publication information by identifying the components of the publication.
Volume title: For journals this is a special title given to a single issue. For conferences it is the conference proceedings title, which is displayed on the screen in the 'Conference' field

Wildcard: Zetoc uses an asterisk, which can only be used at the end of a word, e.g. medic* finds medical, medicinal, medicine, etc.