29fiveIndexes
As index to the story we late talked of.
—Shakespeare, Richard III, act 2, scene 2, line 149a
n index, as defined in the ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science,
is “a systematic guide to the contents of a file, document, or group of
documents, consisting of an ordered arrangement of terms or other symbols
representing the contents and references, code numbers, page numbers, etc.,
for accessing the contents.”^1 Some of the most familiar types of these “system-
atic guides” were once available only in print, for example, the indexes found
at the ends of books, the index volumes of encyclopedia sets, and indexes to
newspapers and periodicals. For the most part, these print indexes are still
available. In the case of newspaper and periodical indexes, however, online
indexes now are more often the reference tool of choice. One of the advantages
of using online indexes is that they often include abstracts of articles, and some
of them include the full texts of articles as well as abstracts.
What is an abstract? The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science
defines an abstract as “an abbreviated, accurate representation of a work
... accompanied by a bibliographic reference to the original work.”^2 In other
words, an abstract tells you exactly what an article is about in addition to
providing its title and the title of the publication in which it appears and the