The system has two fundimental purposes. The first, obviously, is to catalog our book collection, and the second is to advance our careers. I need an excuse to learn J2EE and a home brew catalog system will look good on Stacy's resume. The system will be very basic. It must be capable of cataloging a wide array of media types. It must also be web based and accessible from outside our house, most likely from our web server.
Actors
Cataloger - A person who does the data entry
Patron - A person who accesses the database
There are two other rolls:
Administrator - A person who maintains the physical system
Archivist - A person who converts materials into forms that can be accessed
through the catalog, such as digitizing photographs or sound clips
but these do not require affordances in the system itself.
Needs and Goals
Cataloger:
Patron:
(note: Different search criteria may require separate search result screens during the process of narrowing the search)
Unique and Shared Information
This is a very short list. Stacy is working on a comprehensive one. Unique fields are unique to an individual material record, information not shared with any other material record. Shared fields are information that shared/normalized between one or more material records. Robert Heinlein, for instance, is an author who has written many books and movies. There will be only one entry for him in the Authors table, which will be linked to many materials records. This prevents problems with multiple spellings and speeds selection of materials.
| Unique | Shared |
|---|---|
|
Title Copyright Volume/Number Description Call Number |
Uniform Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Publisher(s) Subject Terms Physical Form |
Because each shared piece of information will be manifested as a link from the material record to a separate list, that list will have to be independently maintained. For instance, there will be only one entry for a particular author with links to all materials that author created. Each material record can be linked to zero or more authors. Some items many have no author. For instance, we may want to catalog our collection of meteorites.
In order to link a material record to an author, a search will have to be performed and if no acceptable selection can be found, then the option of creating a new author record will have to be offered. Similarly, when the last link to an author is deleted, then the author too must be deleted. This is the easiest way to maintain the shared lists.
I'm inclined to lump artists and authors together because the difference can get rather blurry at times. So an Author is a creative contributor and a Publisher is a business contributor. In the case of the lava rocks, Author might be Mona Loa or Mohave. The publisher could be the studio or distributor on a CD and the author could be the director and writer on a film. The differenciation is necessary, because the publisher includes the distributor, the root contact point for the purchase of the material.
All Materials have one and only one Form. Meteorites and lava rocks might be called Mineral Sample for instance. Materials with multiple forms will have multiple Material entries. An example would be, Alice in Wonderland, which comes in many different Forms, video tape, DVD, book, audio cassette, viewmaster reels, etc. Location is the most likely spot that you might find the material. Think of it as a suggestion or a guideline as to where you ought to put it back when you finally do find it.
Catagories, like Form and Location, unfortunately will have to have the ability to be split and joined, otherwise when we buy a new bookcase in a different room we will have to spend a great deal of time changing the location entries for the books as we move them over. We might want to put the lava rock collection under its own Form entry in order to produce collection listings of just the lava rock collection, sans the meteorites and other minerals. As yet, I have no clue as to how this can be easily accomplished. Joining, on the other hand, is easy. Make all of one category the same as another and then delete the old category label.
Description may include a picture. Some things, like similar minerals, can only be described that way.