Word of the Week

Index

The word index can mean a lot of things to a lot of people – even in library land!
In the new Millennium system Index refers to the criteria you search by. If you go back a few Words of the Week to the word Record you can see that each record contains certain types of information. The information in each record is organized or “indexed” in a way that allows Millennium to easily search for specific types of information.

This leads us to Indexing. Indexing is the process that Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (the maker of Millennium) went through to set up our database. Innovative’s data analysts took a look at the data from our GEAC system and figured out which part (or “field”) of each bibliographic record was the title, which was the author, and so forth. Then they took the information from certain fields (author, title, and call number, for example) and made a list of every piece of information from every record for each of those fields – in other words, an index!

When you do a search in the Millennium database (whether using Encore, WebPAC Pro or the Millennium staff client), Millennium looks for your term in one or more indexes. If you do a title search, Millennium checks for your terms in the title index. An author search checks the author index, and so forth. Other pieces of information you can search (also known as indexed fields, because they are pieces of data – a.k.a. “fields” – that are included in an index) are the subject headings, ISBN, and call number.

Indexes are important in our patron data, also. Because our patron records are stored in a database, and we need to retrieve a particular patron record when that patron is standing in front of us at the circulation desk, fields like the patron’s name and barcode are indexed, so that we can search for one of those pieces of information to find the right patron’s record in the database.

Mary Andrew contributed to this week’s WOW. Thanks, Mary!