Library lingo

[Peter Murray]

Junus, Ranti wrote:

>Does anybody has a program reaching out to faculty, students, or general public to understand library lingo.  You know, that OPAC (O-whaat?), Indexes (students I talked to think it's only refers to the back of a text book), Databases (Computer Science students scratched they heads because their understanding is about raw data, not articles), Journal (and they think it means "diary")... stuff like that.
>
Worst of all for this CS-student-turned-librarian was trying to figure 
out why databases were called 'files', as in "I'm going to search the 
ABI file to see if the appropriate citation is there."  Fortunately, 
that usage of the term 'file' has all but disappeared as most of us and 
our users are more acquainted with the personal-computer (or Internet) 
meaning of the word...


Peter