What is a member?

[Paul_de_Barros]

I have an xlsx file that appears to be output from a SAS process.  It contains one worksheet with a table of data.  The column headers in the table of data are varnum, memname, name, label, type, length, format, and thru_dt.  All of the values in the memname column are the same string. 

Question 1: I know that memname means member name, but what is a member?  Is it a library?  A variable?  A dataset?  An observation?  Does it depend on the context?

Question 2: This appears to be output from PROC CONTENTS.  Does that sound right?  If so, what does memname mean in this context?

[Ksharp]

memname stands for
1) table name
2) view name
3) category name
......

Member Type
CATALOG
DATA
ITEMSTOR
MDDB
VIEW

[PaigeMiller]

If it is from PROC CONTENTS, then MEMNAME is the data set name.

The data set is a member of a library.

[Cynthia_sas · Accepted solution]

Hi:
Just as your regular city library has mostly books, but it also has newspapers and magazines, a SAS library mostly has datasets which have a member type of DATA. But SAS libraries can also contain catalogs, formats, item stores (such as template stores) and other SAS-specific objects. A SAS library can contain more than just datasets. Because of this a SAS library will identify the member name (memname) and member type (type) in the CONTENTS or PROC DATASETS output.
Cynthia