Glossary
Definitions
Artifact - an object made or used by humans.
Citation - a reference created to help a reader find a published or unpublished source. For more information, see the Citing help guide.
Collection - items grouped together based on thematic relationships, titles, sources, or funding. Some items may belong to more than one collection.
Controlled Subject Vocabularies - lists of subject words or headings created and verified by established institutions. Item records may include subject headings from these and many other controlled vocabularies: Art and Architecture Thesaurus (Getty), Library of Congress Subject Headings, Legislative Indexing Vocabulary, NMC Chenhalls, Sears List of Subject Headings, and Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (Library of Congress).
Creator - a person or organization partly or wholly responsible for creating an object. Some examples of creators are authors, editors, photographers, sculptors, composers, etc.
Embargo - In academic publishing, an embargo is a time period during which access to a published item is not allowed. The embargo time period is generally determined by the publisher and can range from several months to several years.
Item - a distinct artifact, text, image, musical score, recording or other object that has been digitized for presentation in the UNT Digital Library.
Item Record - a unique record containing an image of an item along with descriptive information (metadata) about the item. You can find an item record by clicking on either the title or thumbnail image in a search results list.
Metadata - descriptive information about an item. The UNT Digital Library uses a locally-qualified Dublin Core metadata standard called UNTL, but we also make our metadata available to interested parties in Dublin Core and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) formats.
OCR - optical character recognition technology that "reads" text images such as newspapers or books to provide searchable text for locating words or phrases from your search. OCR is not fool-proof technology, and there is a margin of error in how it translates the text from the images into searchable text. While the overall quality of the OCR results is good, the results may vary depending on how well it "reads" the original materials.
Page Hit - a page of text on which a keyword or phrase from your search appears. For example, the word "grain" appears on 19 different pages in Harvesting Grain Sorghums, so there are 19 page hits for "grain" in that book.
Partner - a department, institution, organization, or individual that contributes items to the UNT Digital Library.
Persistent Link - an Internet address (URL) that remains unchanged over time.
Physical Object - an inanimate three-dimensional thing from a partner's collection. Physical objects are usually represented in the UNT Digital Library by photographs of the objects. You can use the "type" drop-down list in our search forms or filters to locate physical objects.
Primary Source - firsthand account or evidence contemporary to the event or object being examined. For more clarification see Scholars’ Definitions of Primary Sources. To learn how our staff designates primary sources in the Digital Library, see our metadata standards for primary sources.
Sequence - the numbered order of files or pages of a text item in the UNT Digital Library. The purpose of "sequence" is to show the arrangement of pages in a text item regardless of the pagination appearing on the original printed pages.
Serial Title - a title representing an entire serial publication such as a newspaper, magazine, journal, or yearbook.
Series Title - a title representing an entire series of separate but related items such as the Farmers' Bulletin Series or the War Department Field Manual Series.
Subject - a word or heading that describes the content of an item. Items in the UNT Digital Library contain user-generated keywords, as well as headings from a variety of controlled subject vocabularies. Please see Controlled Subject Vocabularies.
Text - an item that consists primarily of printed or hand-written words and is intended for reading. All text items in the Digital Library are scanned or photographed. The resulting image files are then presented for viewing. This is why we also use OCR or transcription to prepare text for searching.
Transcribed Text - searchable text prepared by a human operator. Because OCR does not effectively read cursive handwriting, transcription is sometimes used to prepare searchable text for letters or other handwritten documents.
Title - the name given to an item. A title that comes from some source other than the item itself will appear in square brackets [ ].
Wildcard - a special character (?, *, etc.) placed in a word to tell the search engine to look for any letter(s) or character(s) in that position in the word. Wildcards are used to broaden a search, but they may produce unexpected results.