Full-text database


A full-text database or a complete-text database is a database that contains the complete text of books, dissertations, journals, magazines, newspapers or other kinds of textual documents. They differ from bibliographic databases and non-bibliographic databases.
One of the earliest systems was IBM STAIRS, introduced in 1973.
Full-text databases became common about 1990 when computer storage technology made them economic and technologically possible. There are two main classes: an extension of the classical bibliographical databases into full-text databases and Internet-based full-text databases.