How is a database organized? (cont.)
Databases organize records (the journal article, book, conference paper, etc.) into categories of information called fields. A record could be organzied by access number (AN), author (AU), title (TI), journal (JN), and abstract (AB) fields.
For example, in this ERIC record, the author’s name is entered into the author (AU) field. A summary of the article is entered into the abstract (AB) field:
Databases are sophisticated enough to let you search for a word or words in one or more fields. You could find this record in ERIC by searching for the author’s name (Clements) in the (AU) field, or by searching for a keyword (maybe constructivism?) in the abstract (AB) field.
