[Sigkm-l] help--need database software advice
David Riecks
david at riecks.com
Tue Sep 9 20:34:51 EDT 2008
At 08:21 AM 9/9/2008, Rachel Holzaepfel wrote:
>-I'm looking to archive information about thousands of videos and
>articles. Basically, I want a program where I can easily input
>details about each video and article
Rachel:
It's unclear if you are simply wanting to input textual metadata
about physical resources, or if you are also wanting to house digital
copies of these resources along with their metadata (separate or
attached). Can you clarify?
Are these "Videos" things that are in a plastic clamshell on magnetic
tape (or perchance are they DVD's?), or are you referring to
Quicktime, AVI, or Mpeg movie files that are on a computer?
Are these "articles" printed documents, or electronic documents that
are stored as PDF or Word documents?
How many items are you talking about?
>-I need up to 12 categories to describe each article or video
Do you mean twelve fields.... like author, title, description.... or
twelve "tags" or keywords to describe each article or video?
If the latter do you have a specific taxonomy or controlled
vocabulary that you will use? (see my site
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/ for some ideas on what I mean here.
>-My computer will likely be the only one that has the program on it,
>so there has to be a way to back up on the server what I've archived
Or if the server is backed up, you should put the data or catalog
file on the server, and then access it from your local machine. This
way the file on the server can be automatically backed up.
>Currently the company is using Excel to store this archived
>material. It works, but is a bit messy and hard to use.
Excel certainly isn't the worst thing in the world, especially for
data entry, but other applications such as Filemaker do provide the
means to create value lists that can simplify repetitive data entry.
There are also other options out there. If these videos are ones that
are commercially available, there are applications out there (such as
http://www.collectorz.com/movie/ ) that can automatically retrieve
the basic metadata from an online database after you type in the UPC
number, or scan the barcode.
Even if you decide to "roll your own" you might want to look at the
field names that they use, and some sample values before deciding on
a layout. Chances are, Filemaker already has a template for managing
"collections" of items (CD's, Albums, Movies), so certainly worth
modifying one of those than starting from scratch.
Hope that helps.
David
--
David Riecks (that's "i" before "e", but the "e" is silent)
Need Keywords for your database? Get the Controlled Vocabulary Solution
http://controlledvocabulary.com/products/ support for a dozen of the
most popular imaging applications from Adobe Bridge to Photo Mechanic.
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