Information Retrieval Tools, Catholicon to Accessing Library Resources

A lot of authors have defined the abstract from different point of view. Lancaster (2003) defines an abstract as a brief but accurate representation of the contents of a document and he opined that an abstract is different from an extract, an annotation or summary. Rowley (1996) defines an abstract as a concise and accurate representation of the content of a document in a style similar to that of the original document. She adds that an abstract covers all the main points made in the original document and usually follows the style and the arrangement of the parent document. Abstract as documentary products always take the form of short texts either accompanying the original document or included in its surrogate.

Abstracts are very similar to indexes. An abstract give a title description of the title or research paper listed. It is also states the objectives, methodology used in carrying out the research and the finding which helps the user to find it easier to know whether or not to follow a particular articles or publication.

It is pertinent to note here that most popular abstract found in most libraries is the Chemical Abstracts. Therefore a good abstract should be accompanied by adequate bibliographical description or reference to enable the original publications or articles to be traced, retrieved and utilized. The arrangement of abstracts can be done using any convenient method, although the most frequent are the alphabetical and classified arrangement.

It can be seen from the foregoing that creation of abstract should not be left for the haft-baked or incompetent. It is a core operation in document and information processing which requires good literacy skills and extensive experience in solid information handling skills would enable the abstractor to construct abstracts that should help in effective utilization of documents, either in library or elsewhere.

The term abstracting is simply and essentially, the process of producing a brief summary of a document showing silent issues like the objectives, scope, procedure or methodology, conclusion and recommendations contained in the document.