Database Project


Reasoning


Professor Carson has been collecting annotations from his graduate students for the over several semesters. He is pleased with the quality of the selections, which relate to topics he also covers in his undergraduate courses. Professor Carson would like a database designed to organize the collection of annotations over a period of five years. He would like the database to be searchable by subject,title, author's name and year of publication. In addition, he would to create a data entry form (secured by password) where his graduate students can continue adding new annotations to the database. A hard copy of each annotation will be presented to Professor Carson for approval before it is entered into the database. Before entering an annotation, the graduate students must check the existing list of titles to be sure they are not entering duplicates.

Process


You, as the librarian, decide to use Microsoft Access 97 SR-1 to create the database. The database will be hosted on the library's web server. A link to the database will be added to the library's home page as well as to Professor Carson's home page. This will be a valuable resource to Professor Carson and his students for assignments and also, it can be used by others who might be interested in Library Science and Information Technology.

  1. Resource Requirements:

    Microsoft Access 97 was installed as part of the MS Office suite which requires:
    486 or higher processor
    Microsoft Windows 95/98 operating system or later
    16MB RAM
    200MB Hard Disk Drive
    CD Rom Drive

  2. Data Requirements:

    Each record is made up of the following fields:

    auto id# - 4 bytes
    author's name - can be up to 255 characters or the length set by the field size (set at 50 characters)
    year of publication - can be up to 255 characters or the length set by the field size (set at 4 characters)
    title of article - can be up to 255 characters or the length set by the field size (set at 150 characters)
    title of publication - can be up to 255 characters or the length set by the field size (set at 100 characters)
    volume(issue)pages - can be up to 255 characters or the length set by the field size (set at 10 characters)
    web address - each part of the three parts of a hyperlink datatype can contain up to 2048 characters
    50 word annotation - the memo field can hold up to 65,535 characters

    These fields will accomodate all information from the collected annotations which are to be entered by Professor Carson's graduate assistant. Additional records (approximately 375 per semester for the next 10 semesters) will be added by Professor Carson's graduate students.

    The current size of the database with 10 records is approximately 30k. To add 3,750 more records over the next 5 years the database could grow to as large as 112MB.

  3. Operational Requirements:

    The data entry form will be password protected so that only those students who have been approved by Professor Carson will be allowed to enter new records. Only Professor Carson and the librarian will be able to change data in the fields once it has been entered. All other interested parties will be able to retrieve data without restrictions. Records can be stored and arranged by various fields.

  4. Output Requirements:

    All records can be viewed easily on-screen and/or on printed reports. Each report is based on a query such as name, subject or title. To search the records, you must choose a query from the switchboard and then either enter specific search criteria, such as a particular last name, subject or title or you may enter an asterisk for a wildcard search which will bring up a sorted list of all records based on the chosen query.

    Conclusion

    For this assignment, Access was challenging to use. Access is a very powerful program with many features that become increasingly complicated with additional queries compiling data from any number of tables. While Access may seem simple enough at first, in my experience it is not at all intuitive when it comes to using some of the more powerful features. Anyone who is considering using Access for ongoing data collection or larger projects would be well advised to receive some training in Access in order to minimize frustration and maximize its powerful uses. There is good reason for the need to have jobs specifically dedicated to specialized skills such as data processing and programming.