This database software allows you to create surrogates
for the items in a collection. It was designed by
librarians and is used in many libraries for their online
catalogs (for instance, the Pala Tribal Library in San
Diego County and the Fed In Print 
collection of the U.S.
Federal Reserve Bank) and for other databases. We use it
for LIBR 202 because it combines a database structure with
the ability to do text retrieval within the database
fields. It instantiates the information storage and
retrieval concepts that we cover in this class.
Database design has two fundamental steps. The first is to determine what the data structure should be, based on your knowledge of the collection, the users, and principles of information retrieval. The second is to create the actual records (surrogates) for the entities in the collection. The records are the part of the database that contain the information about each object in the collection; the data structure is the format for the records.
A very simple example of these two steps:
Say you wanted to design a database for your collection of 1960s LP records.
The first step is to determine what the data structure should be, based on your knowledge of the collection, the users, and principles of information retrieval. To begin with, every record should have a unique identifier that refers to one specific object in the collection - this can be a simple number starting with 1, progressing up to 20 or 2,000 or whatever. The less simple decisions concern how people will want to aggregate the items in your collection. Will they want to find all the records released in a given year? Will they want to find all the records from a particular musical genre? Will they want to find all the records by a particular artist? Will they want to find all the records with female/male/group vocalists?
If the answer to all those questions is "yes," then your data structure will need to have fields for Year Released, Genre, Artist, and Vocalist. After you've decided on the fields, you need to decide how to format what is put into the field - for instance, should year of release be expressed as 1963 or 63? Will you distinguish folk from folk rock under genre, or group them together? Will you use the name John Lee Hooker, or John Hooker, or John L. Hooker for the blues artist? Will you use the Motown term "girl groups" in the Vocalist field or "female vocalists"? Detailed decisions have to be made about the values which you will allow for each field. For some fields you will need to standardize the choices as this paragraph suggests; for other fields you may just take whatever information the album cover or liner notes provide.
So in this example, your fields will be: unique identifier, genre, artist, vocalist, and you may also want album title and titles of individual songs on the album. For each field, you'll need to decide how to express the information about the albums so that it's consistent and predictable. If you want to limit the terms that can be used for some of the fields to certain values that you specify ahead of time, you'll create a validation list for that field as part of the data structure.
Once you have made firm decisions about the fields and values and put them into your data structure, you go to step 2 and create the actual records, one record for each item in your collection. For the first album, you would create an empty record and then go through each field and fill in the information (the values) for the field for that particular album. Then go through and fill in all the fields for the second album. And so on.
So you have a data structure that is the format for all the records in the database, and the individual records for each of the items.
DB/TextWorks is one product offered by Inmagic, a company that designs content catalog software for integrating and managing information assets. Take a look at their product description here:
www.inmagic.com/what-is-the-library-suite?q=textworks
Inmagic is now marketing DB/TextWorks as a building piece in social knowledge management for businesses. Take a look around the links provided on this page (and if you're interested, check out the company's homepage at www.inmagic.com ), including the one to
Presto for Social Libraries , which is a tool for managing both content (i.e., documents, images, etc.) and the knowledge held by expert human beings within the organization.
The Case Studies links from the www.inmagic.com/what-is-the-library-suite page give you an idea of how organizations are using this software, and the Data Sheets links provide useful information about the product that we’re using.
A fully functional demonstration version of DB/TextWorks can be downloaded from this SJSU SLIS web site at Downloads: Inmagic DB/TextWorks. Current password information is available from your instructor. Please note that although this version has all the functionality of the full program, only 50 records can be entered into a database to prevent people from abusing the free demonstration version.
Mac OS X users: Unfortunately, InMagic doesn't seem to see Mac users as its market; if you don't have access to a PC, see the information for Mac users at Using Inmagic DB/TextWorks on Mac OS X.
One Washington Square - San José, California USA, 95192-0029
Phone: 408-924-2490
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