These codes are like the secret handshake of librarianship; with cryptic combinations of letters and numbers, they tell the initiated exactly where to find a book.
What are Call Numbers?
100
The section in front of a book indicating the organization of the text.
What is the Table of Contents?
100
Coined by Stephen Colbert and named after Wikipedia, it is the concept that something is true if enough people believe in it.
What is "Wikiality"
100
The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing it off as your own.
What is Plagiarism?
100
Jerry, Mickey, or that thing plugged into your computer.
What is a Mouse?
200
At the Wallace Library, this area is home not only to books, but also to the pre-21st-century periodicals.
What is the Stacks Level?
200
The section at the end of a book or article that lists the works cited in the text.
What is a Bibliography or Reference List?
200
Three top-level domain names that often indicate that a website is reliable.
What are .ORG, .GOV and .EDU?
200
E.g., MLA, APA, CMS, ACS, CSE
What are Citation Styles?
200
Cloud-based software for collecting and managing sources as well as formatting footnotes and bibliographies.
What is Citation Management Software (e.g. Zotero, RefWorks, Cite-n-Write)?
300
A database of a library’s holdings, it used to take up entire rooms but now fits on a hard drive or lives in the cloud.
What is the Library Catalog?
300
A brief section in an encyclopedia that provides an overview of a topic and additional sources.
What is an Entry?
300
An important link or tab that details a website’s mission and purpose.
What is the About Page?
300
A rewording of another's statement or idea.
What is a Paraphrase?
300
A set of tools for easy collaboration on a research paper or project.
What are Google Apps?
400
Aaron Swartz hacked this digital library, which eventually led to his suicide. It was established in 1995 and offers digitized back issues of hundreds of scholarly journals.
What is JSTOR?
400
A pithy paragraph summarizing an article’s research question, methodology, and sometimes conclusion.
What is an Abstract?
400
A microblogging service that was used by activists to coordinate their activities during Arab Spring.
What is Twitter?
400
The only person whose unpublished work and ideas you don’t have to cite.
Who is Yourself?
400
A top notch survey system that is available to the Wheaton community through an institutional site license.
What is Qualtrics?
500
This code is used to uniquely identify electronic documents.
What is a DOI?
500
A document detailing the contents of an archival collection.
What is a Finding Aid?
500
This British computer scientist is widely regarded as the “inventor” of the World Wide Web.
Who is Sir Tim Berners-Lee?
500
A Classic Rocker who was sued for copyright infringement because a song that he wrote in 1985 was, allegedly, too similar to a song he wrote in 1970 when he was the lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Who is John Fogerty?
500
A sheet of paper, marked with a grid, in which financial data is recorded and totals calculated manually; OR
A computer simulation of such a system of recording tabular data, with totals and other formulas calculated automatically.