Basic vs Additional Index
•For our toy database, our titles and subjects comprise the basic index •Our additional index will be the author index
Well, I’ve been introducing an awful lot of vocabulary through these first ten slides.  Remember that Walker and Janes has a pretty nice glossary.  The existence of a basic index versus additional indexes is extremely important for searchers to understand.  From a searchers perspective, whenever you search a database without specifying a particular field to search, the basic index is searched.  It’s kind of a default instruction for computer to follow.  It’s also VERY important to realize that the basic index in one database can be different from the basic index in another database.  To complicate matters even further, a database that you’ll find on the DIALOG service might also be found in EBSCOHost or FirstSearch.  Even though they host some of the same databases, they may choose to index them in different ways.  Sometimes a database host might choose to leave certain fields completely out of the indexing process.  The important lesson to learn here would be that the savvy librarian must be ready for anything and should endeavor to find out what is defined as the basic index and which additional indexes exist for all the databases that they search.  Thankfully you don’t have to memorize all that junk!  You just need to know how to look up this information and how to best articulate the situation to your end users.  We’ll learn about how to do this with Dialog and that will provide you with a very good example for the future.