Common Concepts

The description of concepts you will encounter here and there in the Invenio. Our interpretation may differ from the practice found in other products, so please read this carefully.

  1. sysno - (ALEPH|old) system number

    Stands for (ALEPH|old) system number only. Which means that, for outside-CERN Invenio installations, stands for an ‘old system number’ whatever it is, if they want to publicise it instead of our internal auto-incremented Invenio record identifiers.

  2. recID - Invenio record identifier

    Each record has got an auto-incremented ID in the “bibrec” table (formerly called “bibitem”). This is the basic “record identifier” concept in Invenio.

  3. docID - eventual fulltext document identifier

    Each fulltext file may have eventual docID. This will permit us to interconnect records (recID) with fulltext files (docID), if we want to. At the moment there is only one-way connection from recID to docID via HTTP field 856. This is ugly. I think we may probably profit by introducing recID-docID relationship in several ways: file protection, reference extraction, fulltext indexing... (?!)

  4. field - logical field concept such as “reportnumber”

    A bibliographic record is composed of ‘fields’ such as title or author. Note that we consider ‘field’ to be a logical concept, that is compound and may consist of several physical MARC fields. For example, “report number” field consists of several MARC fields such as 088 $a, 037 $a, 909C0 $r. Another example: “first report number” consist of only one MARC field, 037 $a.

  5. tag - physical field concept such as “088 $a”.

    Having defined the concept of ‘logical field’, let’s now turn to the ‘physical field’ that denotes basically the concept of ‘MARC field’ as defined in MARC-21 standard. In addition to tag, a field may contain two identifiers to describe the data content, and subfield codes to denote various parts of the content. See our HOWTO MARC guide on this.

    Thus said, in the implementation of our bibliographic tables (bibXXx) we have sort of generalized the term ‘tag’ to stand for:

    tag = tag code + identifier1 + identifier2 + subfield code

    This convention, while taking some freedom from the MARC-21 standard, enables us to write things like “field: base number, tag: 909C0b, value: 11”. If this interpretation is indeed too free with respect to the standard usage of terms, we may change them in the future.

  6. collection - here we distinguish (i) primary collection concept

    and (ii) specific collection concept.

    The (i) primary collections are basic organizational structure of how the records are grouped together in collections. The primary collections are used in the navigable search interface under the ‘Narrow search’ box. The (ii) specific collections present an orthogonal view on the data organization, that is useful to group together some records from different primary collections, if they present a common pattern. The specific collections are used in the search interface under the ‘Focus on’ box.

    The primary collections are defined mainly by the collection identifier (“980 $a,b”); and the specific collections are as defined by any query that is possible for a search engine to execute (see also “dbquery” column in the “collection” table).

    In the past we used to use the term “catalogue”, that is now deprecated, and that can be interchanged with “collection”.

  7. doctype - stands for web document type concept, used in WebSubmit

    The “document type” is used solely for submission purposes, and fulltext access purposes (“setlink”-like). For example, a document type “photo” may be used in many collections such as “Foo Photos”, “Bar PhotoLab”, etc. Similarly, one collection can cover several doctypes. (M:N relationship)

  8. baskets, alerts, settings - covering personal features

    Denote personal features, for which we previously used the terms “shelf” and “profile” that are now deprecated.