Subject: Marginally OT: databases

From: "Mike Ross" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 12 22:37:00 2003

First, a confession... I test databases for a living!

Having said that, I'm remarkably ignorant when it comes to the process of 
actually manually shoving great wedges of data into them...

I'm trying to design a database to catalogue the Corestore collection. It's 
my intention ultimately to construct a database-driven website to make much 
more of the collection publically-accessible - the present website is 
woefully out of date and generally inadequate.

I can design the backend database no problem - I'll probably use DB2, create 
tables with the fields you would expect - catalogue number, manufacturer, 
serial number, date, free-text description, etc etc. Also binary fields to 
hold images, if it's an artifact worth photgraphing, and data, if it's a 
data artifact - e.g. if it's a disk pack or paper tape, an image file of the 
contents.

What I'm looking for is some suggestion as to a 'ready to use' front-end 
data entry package that would be suitable. Critical to this is the ability 
to drag and drop, for instance, .jpg images into the appropriate data fields 
- there are going to be so many of these that the idea of typing path or 
file names into something doesn't bear thinking about. I've no idea where to 
start with this - my career testing databases has lef tme clueless on how to 
go about data entry!

Suggest anyone willing to assist replies via email, unless they feel that 
discussion of this topic on the list would be helpful to others.

TIA

Mike
http://www.corestore.org

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