Information Sources Questions and Answers

Answer: C

EconStor is provided by the German National Library of Economics.

EconStor is the open access repository for economics run by the ZBW, the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, which is Germany's national library of economics. It makes working papers and articles freely available.

It is not run by the Library of Congress, and there is no Australian or Dutch 'National Library of Economics' behind it.

Answer: D

The answer is (iii) and (iv) are correct: conference proceedings and journals.

Primary sources carry original information reported for the first time. Research journals and conference proceedings publish new findings, so they are primary sources.

Bibliographies list other documents and yearbooks compile facts from other sources, so both are secondary sources.

Answer: C

The secondary source is Abstracting periodicals.

Primary sources report original work for the first time. Secondary sources are compiled from primary ones to organise and point to them: indexing and abstracting periodicals, bibliographies, reviews and most reference works. An abstracting periodical such as Chemical Abstracts summarises articles already published elsewhere.

Patents, conference proceedings and standards all present original information first-hand, which makes them primary sources.

Answer: D

ScienceDirect is the platform of Elsevier.

ScienceDirect is Elsevier's full-text database of its journals and books in science, technology and medicine, and it sits alongside Elsevier's abstracting and citation database Scopus.

The others run their own platforms: Emerald publishes through Emerald Insight, EBSCO through EBSCOhost and its discovery service, and Sage Publications through Sage Journals. None of them produces ScienceDirect.

Answer: D

The primary document is the Research report.

A research report presents the results of an original investigation for the first time, which is what makes it a primary document, like a journal article, thesis, patent or standard.

The other three are built from primary documents. A bibliography lists them, abstracts summarise them (both secondary sources), and an encyclopedia digests established knowledge into articles, so it is a reference or tertiary source rather than a primary one.

Answer: A

A trade bibliography lists Books available for sale.

Trade bibliographies are compiled for the book trade: they record books in print and newly published titles with the price, publisher and ISBN so that booksellers and libraries can order them. Books in Print and the Cumulative Book Index are standard examples.

Directories of bookshops or of publishers are trade directories, not bibliographies, and 'various types of traders' plays on the word 'trade' without having anything to do with books.

Answer: B

The answer is (i) and (iii) are correct: the gazetteer and the atlas.

A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary giving the location and description of places, and an atlas is a bound collection of maps. Both are the standard geographical sources in a reference collection.

A gazette is an official government publication of notifications and orders, despite the similar spelling, and indexes and abstracts are general bibliographic tools, not geographical sources. Options naming (ii) or (iv) are therefore wrong.

Answer: D

The answer is (ii) and (iv) are correct.

The Directory of Open Access Journals lists quality-controlled open access journals and also indexes their articles, each with a link to the free full text. So it gives a list of journals and articles, and through it the reader reaches full-text articles.

It does not stop at abstracts, since the whole point is free full text, and it is not merely a list of journals, because article-level records are searchable too. That rules out every option with (i) or (iii).

Answer: C

The answer is (iii) and (iv) are correct.

The Marathi Vishwakosh, prepared by the Maharashtra government's Marathi Vishwakosh board, is a general encyclopedia written in Marathi, covering all subjects, and it runs to many volumes, so it is a multivolume work.

It is not a special encyclopedia of the Marathi language, since its subject is general knowledge, not the language itself, and it is not a single-volume work. Options naming (i) or (ii) are therefore wrong.

Answer: A

The correct match is a-ii, b-i, c-iii, d-iv.

Knowledge Organization, the journal of the International Society for Knowledge Organization, is published in Germany (a-ii). Library Herald is published by the Delhi Library Association in India (b-i). The Electronic Library is an Emerald journal from the United Kingdom (c-iii). Library Trends comes from the USA, from the University of Illinois school of information sciences with Johns Hopkins University Press (d-iv).

Option B swaps the British and American journals, and the others mismatch the Indian title.