[Sigkm-l] help--need database software advice

[David Riecks]

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.