Information Sources Questions and Answers

Answer: C

'Facts on File' is a weekly digest of World events.

Facts On File World News Digest has been published weekly in the United States since 1940. It condenses news from many newspapers and periodicals into a summary of national and international events, with a cumulative index, and is a standard current-affairs reference source in libraries alongside Keesing's Record of World Events.

Being an American publication, it gives the United States substantial coverage, which is the trap in 'American events'; but its scope is world-wide, so neither the American, Indian nor Asian options describe it. Asian events are covered by digests such as the Asian Recorder.

Answer: C

The print LISA was arranged according to a special scheme of classification.

Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) arranged its abstracts in a classified order of its own, a scheme drawn up for library and information science literature with facet analysis in the tradition of the Classification Research Group, and supplied subject and author indexes to it. A general scheme would not have given the fine subdivision of library science subjects that the service needed.

That is why the general schemes, Dewey Decimal, Colon and UDC, are wrong: none of them was the arrangement used in the printed issues.

Answer: A

Research periodicals are a primary source.

A primary source carries new information or original work for the first time. Research journals publish original research papers reporting new findings, theories and data, which makes them the most important primary sources in science along with patents, reports, theses and conference papers.

Secondary sources, such as abstracting and indexing journals, reviews and textbooks, are compiled from primary sources and lead to them. Tertiary sources, such as bibliographies of bibliographies and directories, help users find the primary and secondary ones. 'Meta' is not a category in this classification of documents.

Answer: D

The one that is not a primary source is LISA.

Library and Information Science Abstracts is an abstracting service: it summarises and indexes articles already published elsewhere, so it is a secondary source that leads the reader to primary literature.

The others carry original information. A BIS standard lays down a specification for the first time, and standards are classed as primary sources. A NASA report is a technical report presenting research results, another primary source. Library Quarterly is a research journal publishing original papers. Since three of the four are primary, LISA is the odd one out.

Answer: D

The search engine meant only for scientific information was SCIRUS.

Scirus was launched by Elsevier in 2001 as a science-specific search engine. It indexed scientific journal content together with scientists' web pages, preprint servers, patents and institutional repositories, filtering out non-scientific sites, and was a common tool in libraries until it was retired in 2014.

Google and AltaVista are general web search engines that index all kinds of pages, and Dogpile is a metasearch engine that sends a query to several general engines at once. None of them was limited to scientific information.

Answer: A

The journal available only in electronic form is D-Lib Magazine.

D-Lib Magazine was started in 1995 as an online-only publication on digital library research and development, freely available on the web and never issued in print. It became one of the best-known electronic-only journals in the field before it ceased publication in 2017.

Journal of Documentation (from 1945), Library Quarterly (from 1931) and Library Trends (from 1952) are long-established print journals that later added electronic versions, so they are not available only electronically.

Answer: C

DOAJ lists free and online journals, so the answer is (i) and (ii) are correct.

The Directory of Open Access Journals, started at Lund University in 2003, indexes peer-reviewed journals that are open access: freely available online to any reader without subscription or payment barriers.

Subscription-based journals (iii) are excluded by definition, since access to them is paid for. Printed journals (iv) are not what DOAJ lists either; a title qualifies by being freely available online, whatever print edition it may also have. So any option including (iii) or (iv) is wrong.

Answer: A

The answer is D. Grogan.

Denis Grogan, in Science and Technology: An Introduction to the Literature, grouped documents into primary sources (new information, such as journal articles, patents and reports), secondary sources (works that organise the primary literature, such as indexes, abstracts and reviews) and tertiary sources (guides to the first two, such as bibliographies of bibliographies and directories).

J.S. Mill was a philosopher of logic, P.V. Young wrote on social survey research, and J.H. Shera is known for social epistemology and the foundations of librarianship; none of them is associated with this threefold division.

Answer: B

The special features are scale and projection, so the answer is (i) and (iv) are correct.

Geographical sources such as maps and atlases are judged above all by their scale, which sets how much detail they can show, and by their projection, the method used to flatten the curved earth, which decides what is distorted (area, shape, distance or direction).

Revision matters for every reference source, so it is not special to geographical ones. RPM (revolutions per minute) is a feature of sound recordings such as gramophone discs, not of maps. Codes containing (ii) or (iii) are therefore wrong.

Answer: D

ScienceDirect is developed by Elsevier.

ScienceDirect, launched in 1997, is Elsevier's full-text platform for its journals and books in the sciences, medicine, social sciences and humanities, including the Lancet and Cell families of titles.

The other publishers have their own platforms: Emerald publishes Emerald Insight, EBSCO is an aggregator whose interface is EBSCOhost, and SAGE publishes SAGE Journals. None of them developed ScienceDirect.