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Creating an Archives/Museum Database

Creating an Archives/Museum Database. James Mitchell LS560 – Spring 2013. Proposed Website. About the Site. FHU’s Archives and Special Collections is managed by one professional staff member and four student workers.

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Creating an Archives/Museum Database

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  1. Creating an Archives/Museum Database James Mitchell LS560 – Spring 2013

  2. Proposed Website

  3. About the Site • FHU’s Archives and Special Collections is managed by one professional staff member and four student workers. • The purpose of this database is to provide a portal for authorized users to enter, modify, and query data relevant to the management of the archives.

  4. The Database • Archives, Museums, and Manuscript Libraries utilize a variety of data sets to manipulate and access information. • Flat files traditionally created by these organizations include donor files, accession files, outgoing loan files, inventories, etc. • A relational database makes it possible for the archivist/curator to query a database to answer a variety of questions, such as: • How many donations have been given by a certain individual? • What accessions does the archives have loaned out to a particular institution?

  5. The Database • To demonstrate the capabilities a relational database could have for the FHU Archives, I created four tables with three defined relationships. • The tables consist of the following: Accessions, Donors, Borrowers, Outgoing Loans. • The following relationships were created to prevent replication of data: Accession>Outgoing Loans, Accessions>Donors, and Borrowers>Outgoing Loans.

  6. Relationships

  7. Queries • Two practical scenarios were developed to demonstrate this database’s capabilities for manipulating data to retrieve relevant information.

  8. Query 1 • Query 1: In this scenario, I wanted to demonstrate the databases capability of limiting data to a particular donor. Specifically, I wanted to answer this question. What accessions have been donated by Bill Monroe. • I developed the following query: • SELECT "Accessions"."AccessionID" AS "AccessionID", "Accessions"."Description" AS "Description", "Accessions"."DonorID" AS "DonorID" FROM "Accessions" "Accessions" WHERE ( "DonorID" = 2 ) ORDER BY "Accessions"."AccessionID"

  9. Query 1 (Results) Accessions Donated by Bill Monroe

  10. Query 2 • In this second scenario, I wanted to determine what outgoing loans there have been before today. • I developed the following query: • SELECT "Outgoing_Loans"."BorrowerID" AS "BorrowerID", "Outgoing_Loans"."Date Loaned" AS "Date Loaned", "Outgoing_Loans"."Date Returned" AS "Date Returned", "Outgoing_Loans"."AccessionID" AS "AccessionID" FROM "Outgoing_Loans" "Outgoing_Loans"

  11. Query 2 (Results) Outgoing Loans to Date

  12. Query Report • I decided to create a basic report of the first query. This report is a human friendly version of the data retrieved from the first query.

  13. Reports (Example)

  14. Conclusion • As you can see, the usage of relational databases contains a variety of capabilities that typical flat file databases don’t make possible. • From this VERY basic database, it can be seen that relational databases possess versatile and useful options for archives, museums, and manuscript repositories.

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