Since it’s October, let’s bring out the scary stuff:
Database
Say that word to a group of marketing people and watch them climb under their desks like a 1950s nuclear drill.
Around 1964 a new term appeared in the computer literature to denote a new concept. The term was ‘data base’, and it was coined by workers in military information systems to denote collections of data shared by end-users of time-sharing computer systems. The commercial data processing world..appropriated ‘data base’ to denote the data collection which results from consolidating the data requirements of individual applications. Oxford English Dictionary (new edition)
Science fiction picked up on database early on. I remember Mr. Spock querying the database on the Enterprise. There’s more than one reference to a database in the Star Wars movies. My question is why do we still use this term? At one time they really were repositories of metadata. Now we call collections of full-text journal articles “databases.” I used a database to search the OED. Ask any general library user to define database and they’ll be hard put to come up with a concise, easy definition. Is it a collection of articles, of citations, of definitions?
A librarian at Michigan State University suggested that to better stay in tune with our students maybe we should use “search engine.” CINAHL is a search engine for nursing. Science Direct a search engine for science. Technically it’s not quite correct – a search engine doesn’t actually store the content. But conceptually, it’s understood by our younger crowd.
Another term I once pitched while working for a vendor was “collection.” The nursing collection or the science collection made sense to me as a librarian. It didn’t work for users (that’s a topic for another time – letting go of your failed ideas!).
What about calling it a library? I know that idea gets complex for libraries who are organizing lots of databases. A number of libraries use federated searching to create libraries. An example is the University of Minnesota’s Undergraduate Virtual Library. California has named the Internet an official library. At some point, and it’s closer than we think, a library will be one big database. Do we assimilate or ask Scotty to beam us up?
3 Comments
October 4, 2007 at 8:14 am
Using card-sorting exercises is quite useful in learning what terms your clients use to categorize resources (yet, another term to consider).
October 4, 2007 at 10:16 am
Currently we call our subscription “databases” “Online Resources” which is also vague. We have struggled with what to call these so that people who don’t know what they are would explore them. I’d love to hear what other libraries are calling these, and if there’s any evidence or indication that library users, especially public library users, understand what they are because of the label.
October 5, 2007 at 11:41 am
I’m anxious to watch this discussion as well since we are scheduled for a “re-design” this year at Harford County Public Library (Maryland). And yep, we’re using Online Resources too… initially, we were including the “free web” and categorizing all those librarian-selected web sites along with our subscription sites… not sure we’ll keep doing that either. Why not just use Del.icio.us?