Re: newbie questions

On Sat, 17 Feb 2001 08:37:27 GMT, "Ernie" <ernie_at_earthling.net> wrote:

[snippage interspersed]
>I'm helping a friend of mine do a project. He's got a Surf Bibliography (at
>http://home.earthlink.net/~davedm/), which I'm going to help him modify.
>
>I'd be interested to know if there
>has been anything written on the subject of data modelling for
>bibliographies.

I don't know. Modeling the data is pretty straightforward, with the three caveats.

1. Modeling works of authorship (books, video tapes, movies, paintings, etc) might be what your friend really wants.
2. There are more many-to-many relationships than most people think.
3. The author "Unknown" is widely published.

>We could, of course, type type type, but I wonder if
>it would be worthwhile writing a script that could parse the text, looking
>for clues as to which part of each entry belongs in which field.

If the data is in fairly consistent shape now, then perl, sed, or awk could probably make short work of it. If you don't know perl, sed, or awk, it won't be short work, but I think they're worth learning in any case.

>And is there any reason I shouldn't use MS Access?

Your friend's host might not support it.

>And it occurs to me now that there might be a better forum for my questions
>than this newsgroup. It so, I apologize and what is it? :) Is there a FAQ
>for this NG?

For questions specifically about Access, use comp.databases.ms-access or the microsoft.public.access groups.

Surf Mavericks. Know fear. :)

-- 
Mike Sherrill
Information Management Systems