The abstract should provide a potential reader with a good summary of
the article suitable for deciding whether the article is of interest --
it's the blurb for the article that the reader will use to decide
whether to actually read the article.
Keep in mind that abstracts show up not only in the C4LJ site (table of
contents and individual article), but also in other third party
searches, including EBSCO, DOAJ, and possibly OAISter. [we should
probably fix our HTML to give Google hints to use the abstract on search
results pages too]