Libraries

Libraries compared to databases

From James D. Anderson and José Pérez-Carballo “Information Retrieval Design”:

Of course libraries have been collecting data, in the form of documents, for millennia and have been describing these documents and organizing them for access. This vital function has been shared with a growing number of indexing and abstracting services and a multitude of separately produced indexes, bibliographies, catalogs, and compendia of data of various types, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. Recently, digital libraries have been added to this rich mix. All of these systems for information retrieval can now be encompassed by the broad modern term “information retrieval database.”