methink.com

In short, pagination refers to breaking up large chunks of data or information into multiple pages. It is our job to create an intuitive interface for users to navigate those pages. For example, when you do a Google search, and the results are in the thousands, Google does not give you all the results in one page. It gives you 10 results on 1 page and breaks up the remaining results on subsequent pages. 

I just found a great blog article on some best practices on handling pagination navigation on SmashingMagazine.com. It gives a lot of examples of the different ways pagination is handled by various websites, and explains some principles on why some techniques might be better than others. 

There are a lot of tools, plugins, code libraries out there on various programming frameworks out there to help handle pagination issues. It’s a good idea to work these elements into your design if you are working with large data sets.