Database Project

Description:
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science at URI is creating a database to be available for students enrolled in the program. The database will contain entries from GSLIS students in LSC 508 – Introduction to Information Science and Technology. Each entry will consist of the APA citation elements of various articles read for the course. In creating the database, we hope to provide students enrolled in LSC 508 and the LIS program in general access to a variety of information and relevant articles that have been used and annotated in the past. This database will allow students to examine many annotations, which will be useful as they have to write their own. The database will also be a valuable source of articles relating to the various course topics present in LSC 508. Students will be able to use the articles present in the database as a jumping off point for bigger topics related to Information Science and Technology.

Forms:
The information necessary for each database entry is available directly from GSLIS students’ person Web sites, constructed for LSC 508. There would be one or two people (possibly graduate assistants) in charge of taking the entries from the personal Web sites and entering it into the database. The database will follow current APA guidelines for citations and include fields for; author, year of publication, title of the article, publication, volume number and page numbers of the article, all of which will be present on the students’ Web sites.

Fields:
In addition to the fields for author, year of publication, title of the article, publication, volume number and page numbers of the article, there will be a field to input the student’s last name, the year and semester the article was added into the database and four fields for keywords for the article.
The field for author will have a maximum entry of 150 characters. There will be room for multiple authors (up to six.) The entry consists of the author’s last name and first initial, so it is unlikely that 20 per author characters would not be enough. This field will allow for alphabetical organization and searching by the author’s last name.
Following the author field is the year. This entry will have a maximum (and typically minimum) entry of four characters. This field will allow users to sort the results chronologically.
The field for the title of the article has a maximum entry of 100 characters. The publication field has a maximum entry of 50 characters. The volume number field has a maximum entry of three characters. Some articles will require an entry of issue number as well and that will also have a maximum entry of three characters. The final entry provided by the students’ annotations is the annotation itself. This annotation is required to be less than 50 words and as a result a maximum entry of 500 characters should be sufficient.
There are six more fields; four for entry of keywords of the article, one for entry of the student’s last name and one for the semester in which the article was added to the database. These may be supplied by either the student or by the person in charge of inputting the entries into the database. Fifteen characters is the maximum entry for the article keywords, as well as the student’s last name and 10 characters is sufficient for the semester and year entry.
The total number of characters for each entry would then be approximately 625.


System (software and hardware):
The database would be constructed using FileMaker Pro and with the basic PC set-up of a 100gb hard drive and 512mb of RAM. After five years of entering the annotations into the database, there are expected to be about 8750 records present in the database. With each record being a maximum 625 characters, the database would be approximately 5.5mb in size and would have no problem being run on the computer system.

Searching the database:
It is possible to search the database through any of the fields mentioned above. For example:
If you wanted to find an article published in 2007; you would type 2007 into the Year field and enter to obtain the results.
Find 2007:

2007 Search results:

Here it is possible to see that there are four results found, all of which have the year 2007.
Another example would be to find articles from a particular publication in the case that a student is required to use only Library affiliated publications.

Find lib (I used lib instead of library because this will include terms such as librarian as well):

This search resulted in three records.