CREATING AN ARCHIVES/MUSEUM DATABASEJames 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.

• 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.

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?

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.

Relationships

Queries• Two practical scenarios were developed to demonstrate

this database’s capabilities for manipulating data to retrieve relevant information.

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"

Query 1 (Results)

Accessions Donated by Bill Monroe

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"

Query 2 (Results)

Outgoing Loans to Date

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.

Reports (Example)

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.