Bibliographic/Database

Introduction

Background

The biographic database is used to store a collection of bibliographic records. Many traditional bibliographic databases contained fields to store information about a limited range of printed works, books, articles, manuscripts etc. An example of this type database is the BibTex which is used with the LaTex word-processing application. Many of the current bibliographic database are derived of that early and pioneering application. As new media types were developed new fields were added to the older databases structures, such as URL's for web addresses. Also a miscellaneous reference type was added to support all the other types of media now available, video, graphics etc.

The current OpenOffice bibliographic database is of that type. See bibliodatafield for a list of the fields supported in that database. This database is a simple single table database. The problem with this type of database is that it make it very difficult or impossible to maintain relationships between works and their parts and the contributors to the work. An example is the question of Authors of works. In a single table database, in order to find the works that an Author has been involved with requires the text string searching of the author text fields, and for this to work the user would have had to accurately enter the Author's name in the exactly authorse format of every work. Thus the benefits of a separate author table where the authors name has to entered only once and liked to the works table is clear. As there are often several people and organizations associated with a published work, (authors, editors, publishers, authors of parts of the work, sponsors, series editors etc it often better to define relationships in the database than have long lists of the possible fields in a table most of which are not used. This approach make the database more flexible and preserves the actual relationships, at the cost of a more complex database and increased coding complexity.