What is a Bibliographic Record?
Subject Terms
Preformatted Citations

What is a Bibliographic Record?

When you find something you like in OneSearch, click it! You'll then see the "bibliographic record" for that item.

A Bibliographic Record is a digital record of the book or article that you have found in OneSearch. Think of it as the online version of the old catalog cards that libraries used to have.

In OneSearch, a bibliographic record has a lot of useful information on it! You can find features like email, print, preformatted citation, and permanent links to the item.

You will also find links to the full-text or online version of the item.

There are more helpful pieces of information too, which is called metadata.

Metadata in a book's record helps you understand the book. It can show you the components of the citation (author, publisher, etc) and it can help you understand the physical object (call number, book dimensions).

Call Number

This is like the books address and leads you to its exact location on the library shelves, the stacks.

Title; Creator

These are forms of metadata; you can narrow your searches explicitly to search for keywords in the title, or for author's last name.

Subject; Subject Terms

Subject Terms s are a form of metadata; subjects are attributed to a book by a human being, such as a librarian or information professional.
In the LBCC catalog subjects are hyperlinked, which means you can follow it into a restructured results list. The new results will all be items that have been tagged with the subject term.

Contents

Contents can be used to get a glimpse into the book. In this way, you can see which chapters might have useful information for your research. If the book is an e-book, you can read the content by following links into the book.

Related titles

This is a feature of the LBCC catalog that lets you see if there are other editions or published version in the LBCC catalog.

Publisher; Creation Date; Format; Source

This is all information that is used in the citation. It helps you to see the following:
- Publisher: Which publisher is responsible for making the work available; this is also likely the company that the LBCC library purchased the material from.
- Creation Date: When the book was created/published. This can also be the copyright date. This can help you evaluate currency and relevancy based on the time period it represents.
- Format; This is how the item exists in the world. Is it an actual book? is it a bound journal? Is it a loose-leaf manuscript? It can help you understand what to expect if you want to check the item out from the library.
- Source: This will tell you which database holds the bibliographic record. In this case the LBCC Catalog holds the record. But if you searcher 'articles' you would see the database that the article is located within.

Subject Terms

Subject Terms are a very specific set of terms that are helpful for precision searches. Often, the easiest way to find subject terms is to do a keyword search first and then look at the subject terms for those that are good matches for your topic.

Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) and their discovery systems (OneSearch) have their own kind of controlled vocabulary called subject terms.

Subject Terms are sets of metadata that are dynamic and available to you to create high powered searches.
Subject term searches are a powerful way to search for a particular article or type of article.

Just like how you might stamp an Instagram picture with a series of hashtags, librarians stamp articles with a series of subject terms. The subject terms, just like hashtags, allow students and researchers to find articles that all share a similar subject, and can create very effective search experiences.

OneSearch has its own sets of controlled vocabularies, reflected in each individual record of books and articles found in OneSearch. . This is both useful and confusing, because the user experience can vary! You may need to keep track of subject terms that you find in useful resources, since it will allow you to find variations of a topic, learn what industry-specific terminology is being used in your field, and they can allow you to expand or narrow your search to a more meaningful set of search terms

Preformatted Citations

One of the coolest features that the LBCC Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) has to offer is the ability to copy and paste a pre-formatted citation into your bibliography or works cited. You can find the ability to grab the MLA, APA, or Chicago citation for anything in the OPAC simply by looking for the quotation mark symbol (“) that appears in two places:

Look for the citation feature indicated by the quotation mark (“) in these two places:

On the search results page where the list of results are Each result has a title, author, location, and brief description. The citation feature is located on the far right and is indicated by a quotation mark (“) symbol.
When you click into an item from the search results page and you access its bibliographic record you can find the citation feature linked along the top of the page.