Types of Databases

There are four basic types of online or electronic databases that libraries typically offer.

  1. Bibliographic
    Bibliographic databases are usually indexes, that provide citations to articles in magazines, newspapers, journals, conference proceedings, book chapters and other types of publications. The citations may include a brief summary of the article (called an abstract), but do not include the full text of the document. CAB Abstracts is an example of a bibliographic database.
  2. Full Text
    Full text databases provide the complete text of documents, along with citations and sometimes abstracts or summaries of documents. There are full text databases that provide books online (NetLibrary), articles from magazines and journals (Academic Search Premier) and newspapers (LexisNexis). Even reference books are online in full text, in databases such as the Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia.
  3. Image
    Databases with images, provide scanned images of magazine, newspaper and journal articles, books, works of art and other information. For example, CAMIO is a full image database of art museum images. JSTOR is another example of a full image database, with scanned reproductions of academic journal articles in the social sciences.
  4. Multimedia
    Multimedia databases combine text and illustrations with video, sound, animation and other interactive features. The Encyclopaedia Britannica Online is an example of a database that incorporates images, sound files, links to websites and video in articles.

While databases may be of one type, such as bibliographic, many are combinations of the types. For example, many journal article databases are bibliographic, and offer full text and images of articles.

 

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