Indexing Guide

Land Life Leisure does not aim to index every article in every journal that is available. Sometimes it is necessary to be selective about the material that is included. This guide will hopefully enable all of the indexers to follow the same general rules and guidelines when making decisions about what to include and what terms to use.

Indexing Process

Adding content to Land Life Leisure is very straight forward. Following the guidleines below, summary information of articles is submitted in three stages of a web-based system.

  1. Login and enter details of the article(s) via the input form. This process can be paused and completed at a later stage. The only additional fields not contained in the publication are Terms which can easily be selected from a look-up list.
    Click for larger image:
    image of input form
  2. Editing or further additions can be made by logging in again and listing all current articles.
    Click for larger image:
    image of articles list
  3. Finally, once you're happy with the summary information, a simple request notifies the EDINA team and the content is uploaded into the database as part of a weekly update.
    Click for larger image:
    image of main menu with notification option

If you are interested in adding content please contact the EDINA helpdesk to set up an account.

Selecting publications

Land Life Leisure indexes a wide range of journals, including peer reviewed and non peer reviewed subject specific journals, trade journals and commercial press. They are indexed to provide a full and rounded bibliographic database for our users, enabling them to gain access to a rich source of articles.

How does this help decide whether to start indexing a new journal? If it is of value to your students, it will be of value to Land Life Leisure users. A number of questions you could ask yourself are:

Does the journal contain at least a couple of factual/informative articles?

Does it cover a subject area that is already covered or partially covered by Land Life Leisure?

If you are still not sure, then contact the EDINA helpdesk in the first instance, and they will be able to help decide if the journal is valuable for Land Life Leisure users.

Should I include this article?

When to include:

  • Does it include useful references?
  • Does it contain substantial information
  • Does it contain any useful graphs or charts?
  • Does it cover an area that your students want information on?
  • Does it summarise a current topic?
  • If it is an unusual or rare topic, then include whatever you can find (including short articles or news items)

When not to include:

  • Is it someone's opinion?
  • Is it a very short news article with little or no fact content?
  • Secondary sources (e.g. reports on reports)

Including urls

Land Life Leisure now includes a url (where relevant) in the article record. There are three different types of url that you will see in the record:

Related Website

This is a website that is mentioned in an article, that is spotted during the indexing process. It may contain further information on the topic, or contain a report that has been mentioned in the article, or link to an organisation that the article is about, or points towards something mentioned in the article.

If there is more than one website mentioned, only select one - as we do not have the facility to include more than one of this type of url at the moment. If all of them seem relevant, it may be worth not putting any in, but mentioning in the extra info field that there are interesting links in the article.

This type of url can be added to the article record, using the url box, when filling in the web form.

Publication Website

This is a website produced by the journal/magazine/publication. Often the urls are listed inside the front cover of the publication. These websites often contain extra or current information on their subject area. They may sometimes contain full text, but it is not guaranteed. For more academic publications they will often offer the chance of buying an article - this might be useful to non-academic subscribers who may not have access to a library.

Full text

These websites link to free full text articles. This is mainly press release pages, but some journals do offer a range of free full text articles.

If you want to add a url for one of the publications you index, please contact the team at EDINA with the url and name of the publication, and we can add the details into the datbase.

I can't decide what terms to use

Use what is already there! Land Life Leisure is a well established database, so look back at the sort of material that has been included in the past. Look at the terms that have been used. This will help to build up a picture of the context in which terms should be used. It will also provide insight into the type of subject areas that are regularly indexed.

Work hard for consistency. It is important that users can depend on the terms we use e.g. to search from the word list.

Regularly scan the word list online - it often has new terms added. You will also be told about updated entries to the word list by email, so try and write these up in your paper copy, or keep a note so you can refer to them.

If you can't find any words that cover the article you are indexing, contact the Land Life Leisure team at EDINA. New words are always being added, so we will always consider any suggestions that you wish to make.

Indexing/Inputting styles

In order to standardise Land Life Leisure records we have a set of guidelines for inputting. These are useful for those who submit their indexing via the web interface, and may also be useful for those who submit on paper.

Inputting styles for titles:

  • Always start with a capital letter.
  • Do not start a title with 'The', 'An', 'A' - omit this and start with the next word.
  • Do not use capital letters except for proper names.
  • Do not use symbols or foreign characters - replace Greek letters with their name.
  • Replace a colon (:) with a dash (-).
  • Replace full-stops (.) with a dash (-).

Enhancements/Extra Information:

In the new Land Life Leisure interface, enhacements are now called "Extra Information". As a result The following rules still apply, but the space can also be used for adding more information about the article, such as a summary or a conclusion or a key point. Enhancements should be added if:

An organisation or a named person is cited in the article as the source of the information e.g. a scientist and their organisation are mentioned in a news article, but they have not written the article.
  • Indicate specific information in the article that isn't made clear from the title.
  • The article is on a specific subject that is not covered by the word list.
  • The article contains reference to a person or document that would be a useful search term.
  • The article is a short article or brief news report - and you wish to highlight this.

Rules for enhancements:

  • Do not start with a capital letter, it should be lower-case unless it is a proper name.
  • Do not add a full-stop at the end of the title - instead add a full-stop at the end of enhancement.

Inputting styles for publication information:

  • Journal titles must correspond exactly to the publications master list.
  • Volume numbers are typed as volume and then number (if present) in brackets - 7(12).
  • Do not use number for weekly journals or commercial press - date is enough to identify it.
  • Dates are typed as number-month-year order e.g. 6 Feb 2004.
  • Months are abbreviated to the first 3 letters for all months except March, April, May June and July.
  • Page number are typed in as such: 5-7,9,11-14 (without spaces).

Inputting styles for authors:

  • Authors should be included for all articles where possible/sensible.
  • The first three authors should be listed - any more - use 'et al'.
  • Authors should be typed in as follows:
    • o Smith, J. R.; Jones, S. M.; Brown, D. A.; et al.

Inputting styles for terms:

  • Terms should be typed in upper case with no punctuation (unless punctuation is included in the word list e.g. E.COLI).
  • Terms must correspond exactly with the word list (e.g. HORSES RIDING not HORSE RIDING) - be aware of plurals and typos.
  • Always use the narrowest term available - do not use the a broader term if you are using one of its narrower terms.
  • You can only add a maximum of five terms to any one article.
  • If you think a new term has been added, you can check online - or look at the monthly emails.

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