Introduction

GSLIS students in LSC 508 are required to read ten to fifteen professional articles relevant to the course subject, Information Science and Technology, and write citations and annotations for the articles. Since each student selects their own articles for each topic assigned, a varied collection of articles has been reviewed by the end of each semester. To take advantage of the collective effort of these students, maintaining this collection of articles in a database would be a great resource to professors and students in future information science and technology teaching, learning, and research endeavors.

Since technology changes so rapidly, a database storing information science and technology articles over the past five years would provide up-to-date information for students and faculty studying this subject. GSLIS faculty and students could use this database to find articles on a particular information science and technology topic, from specific journals, or by a specific author, among other uses.

Data Entry Parameters

Herb Carson, professor of LSC 508, provides students with the parameters and rules for creating their annotations. First, there is a list of article topics and the articles must be from the past five years. Second, the article citation format must follow APA citation rules. Third, the annotation must be 50 words or less with sentences beginning with a verb. The following sample annotation serves as an original form for data entry.

So each record in the database would need to have all elements of the citation and annotation included per the table below.

Database Size Requirements

This database would store article annotations for the three terms of five academic years, and assumes no duplicate articles are selected by students. Fall and Spring terms may have up to two classes and summer terms may have up to three classes. Each class has a maximum of 25 students. Fall and spring students are required to write 15 annotations, summer students write ten. To handle this many records, the database size would be calculated as follows:

Fall & Spring:  4 classes X 15 annotations X 25 students = 1500 records 
+ Summer:	3 classes X 10 annotations X 25 students =  750 records
								
		2250 records/year X 5 years = 11,250 records
				
		11,250 records X 966 bytes/record = 9,867,500 bytes
					or approximately 10MB
      

Database Use, Maintenance, and Security

Over time, this will become a large and useful database. During any given semester up to 50 students will need to enter annotations, and many more faculty and staff will access annotations in the database. To manage this much usage, issues such as security via user access levels, backups, and database maintenance all need to be considered.

There are several levels of database usage including administration, data entry, and data viewing. Each needs to use the database in different ways. A Graduate Assistant would need to be assigned the responsibility of Database Administrator. His or her role would be to maintain the database in general, including database modifications, backups, and handling user level passwords to maintain database integrity. Thus, they would have full permissions for database usage including open, read, and modify tables, forms, reports, and queries. They would also be able to read, update, insert, and delete data.

With full priveledges, the Database Administrator would be responsible for maintaining all aspects of the database. Factors to consider include data entry correction, report creation, and database size. For example, articles entered during each year can include articles from the previous five calendar years. So, to keep the records of the database current and to maintain the size of the database, each year the records of articles 5 years or older would be purged. This would allow perpetual use of the database, rather than terminating the life of the database at the end of the 2009/10 academic year.

Students entering annotations into the database would have a user password that allows them to insert and read data and create reports. All other students and faculty would be assigned read-only password permissions for tables, forms, and queries, and assigned create priviledges for reports.

Hardware Requirements

This sample database was implemented on a Pentium 3 DELL PC designed for Windows 98 with Microsoft Office 2000 currently installed. Three fourths of 2GB hardrive is used, and only 64 RAM is installed. All of these software and hardware elements are archaic compared to currently available systems. Although the 10MB database created for this assignment runs and would fit on this system, hardware and software upgrades would be in order for an operational version of the database to run efficiently in the future. An operational version of the LSC508 Annotations Database should be implemented on a personal computer running Windows XP with Microsoft Office 2003. Current hardware comes standard with at least 256 RAM and 40GB of hard drive available which is more than enough to handle the 10MB annotations database over a 5 year period.

To provide ease of access to the annotations database for GSLIS faculty and students, it should be made available through a client/server local area network. With compatable client computers available to faculty in their offices and to students in the GSLIS student study lounge. The server, and all other computers for that matter, should be protected by a power backup.

Database Usage

Copies of the data entry form screen and the following reports demonstrating database usage were mailed to Professor Carson.

1. Topics included in Information Science Journals
This report lists topics included in journals. If the GSLIS department were trying to decide which journals to subscribe to, this report would help by showing which journals included articles about which topics.

2. Report: Information Science Articles sorted by year and topic
This report would be useful for finding current articles for each topic.

3. Report: Records to Delete for Year Given
This report uses a query to prompt the user for the year before creating the report. This would be helpful to the Database Administrator for the purpose of purging five-year-old articles to help keep the database current and manage the size of the database. This query is also available directly from the data entry form if the Database Administrator wanted to search for and delete records from the data entry screen.