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.