Library Science 508: Data Base Project

christina wolfskehl



User Group:

The Annotations Database Project (ADP) is specifically designed for first year Masters of Library Science graduate students whose research experience has been limited to Google-style databases. For these novice researchers sifting through the good databases and the bad ones is a time-consuming nightmare. Furthermore varying search interfaces, like EBSCOHost, prevent these students from conducting thorough inquiries because so much energy is spent learning how to use the individual databases. The ADP is intended to help ease the struggle first semester MLS students often have finding scholarly journal articles.



The Format:

The format of the ADP is based on the rules and conventions established by the American Psychological Association for documenting sources. This is what a typical APA citation and annotation look like:

Albanese, A. (2005). Battle brews over E-reserve [Electronic version]. Library Journal, 130(9), 16-17.

Discusses Association of American Publishers' concern that electronic reserves violate copyright and decrease purchase of course materials. Contends libraries feel that firewalls and passcodes ensure they're abiding by "fair" policy. Discusses why AAP has focused on UCSD. Examines AAP's unprecedented request of requiring faculty to post bibliographies online.


If there are several citation options available why concern ourselves with this one? There are two distinct rationales for this. In general, for any database to be effective a uniform approach must be implemented, otherwise reports are unable to be successfully extracted from the jumbled data. More specifically, the database will be maintained by Professor Herb Carson, and graduate students taking his LSC 508: Introduction to Information Science & Technology course will be authorized to enter data into the system. (And since APA is the only style allowed for documenting academic articles in LSC 508...you get the picture!)




What Makes It Fly?

Now that we have met the users and the database managers lets look at the ADP itself. The ADP was created on a PC computer using MS Access 2000. Access has been around for several years (demonstrating program longevity, a crucial element when selecting software) and is quite user-friendly. It offers a fancy help-option tool called an Office Assistant and templates, referred to as wizards, which assist new users in the creation and navigation of databases. Another welcomed feature of Access is the various options for managing the level of access to the database, including user-level security. With user-level security, database administrators can establish different levels of access to sensitive data in the database. The only requirement for using a database secured with user-level security is a passcode. Hence researchers and data processors can have different authorization passcodes which permit them entr»e into administrator-selected areas of the database. LSC 508 students will be allowed to add and update records only of their own creation, where as first year MLS student researchers will simply be able to create Annotation Reports with the data in the Annotation Records.



Annotation Records:

So what do these Annotation Records look like? CLICK HERE The layout in what is known as columnar form. As you can see it almost looks like a grocery list. While it is certainly not a unique or exciting approach, it does permit the Annotation Record to be in exact order of the elements of an APA citation. This is done for maximum simplicity, thus decreasing the percent of errors during data processing. As an LSC 508 student transfers his/her citation from the page to the database s/he simply must follow the flow of the text on the page and enter the information accordingly. Also decreasing the error percent is the inclusion of conditional formatting statements, i.e. if Internet Journal Database field is checked, then data is required for Database field. For a complete description and rationale of the fields included in each Annotation Record and the maximum allotted size of each field, please CLICK HERE.



Its How Big?!

So how big of a database are we talking? Each Annotation Record will be, at maximum capacity, roughly 1583 bytes (or 1.5458984 KB). So if there are four LSC 508 classes a year with 25 students in each class adding 15 Annotation Records to the ADP, plus one LSC 508 class a year with 25 students entering 10 Annotation Records, then after one year the database will be 2770250 bytes (or 2.6419163 MB). After five years the database should grow to about 13851250 bytes (or 13.2095814 MB). The computer the ADP was created has 512 MB of RAM so it will be able to maintain this database for many years to come.