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Re: Archiving information within databases



Hello fellows and Chris,

For those who are able to read annotated French bibliography of UK-US books
;) please have a look to the following webpage. This is a draft one, NARA,
NEDCC are still missing but will come. By the way if you have suggestions do
not hesitate to contact me.
http://www.buhlmann.freesurf.fr/AAF_Erecords/Biblio.html

I will do a course next week in Paris (French Association of Archivists) on
long-term preservation of electronic archives. This will be focalised on
practices and lessons learned of experiences I know (my CERN
http://library.cern.ch/archives/archinfo.html and GICHD experience). As soon
as I have finished my ppt presentation, you can access it on the web or I
can send it to you if you wish.

Have a nice day, here it is raining except on the Jura and Alps mountains
where it snows.

Elisabeth

Elisabeth Bühlmann 
Records Specialist
Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining 
CP 1300 
7, bis avenue de la paix 
CH - 1211 Genève 1 
Tel. : +41 22 906 16 61 
Fax. : +41 22 906 16 90 
Web : http://www.gichd.ch 



-----Original Message-----
From: Christian van der Ven [mailto:cvanderven@HOME.NL]
Sent: Dienstag, 6. November 2001 21:29
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Archiving information within databases


Good evening,

While it's the first time I post a message to this newsgroup, I think I
should introduce myself to you.

My name is Christian van der Ven, 23 years young, and first of all by
education a teacher of history and politics. For a good year now I'm working
at the municipal archives of Waalwijk, a town in the south of the
Netherlands. Before I started here, my job was at a computer-company.

At this moment I'm studying for Archival Science. Through my specific
background, I now have even a bigger interest for the subject of archiving
information within or from a database.

At the computer-company, I was working hard to build database-applications
for company's which could contain most of the administration of a company.
Of course, the system uses historical data to produce reports that contain
valuable company-information; that can be used to run things better.

The problem is that the system does nothing more than just keeping the old
data in tact, but without fully recognising any archivistic principles that
perhaps should form the basics of the system. Now that I'm trying to learn
more about archivistic subjects, I've come to realize that.

So I'm trying to find more information about the problem with archiving
information within a database. In my opinion, two places play a role in this
matter.

So it is that from the system, I can get different kinds of reports on paper
or out of a printer. A document can also be saved to, for example, the hard
disk of the computer. These documents (on paper or digitally available) can,
to my best knowledge, fairly being archived. However, the original data is
in the database itself! The reports are just (digital) copy's of a part of
the system's data.

Unfortunately the database just doesn't contain traditional 'documents' with
a specific shape and so on, but uses a set of related tables that contain
all of the information, like data for various letters, financial numbers and
addresses. When the user wants a report, the system merges the information
from the tables with a template, so the user gets a nice letter,
good-looking financial stats or a sorted list of addresses.

I wont't get real technical, but my problem is now that the information I
really want to archive, doesn't consists of documents, not even digital, as
we normally see documents, but consists of a set of tables.

I've already put different things on paper that play around this issue, but
you'll understand that a sollution is not in my hands...

Probably no one has the final solution at this moment, but perhaps someone
kan help me with the following:
1. Which ideas do other readers of this newsgroup have about this matter?
Perhaps my own ideas can come to an issue also.
2. Are their any known websites, books or articles that give information
about this subject, from an archivistic point of view? I don't seem to be
able to find them, and I also are unable to search the mail-archive of this
specific server.

I'm looking forward for some reactions (please sent those to the listserv,
so others can read them also).

With regards,

Christian van der Ven
cvanderven@home.nl


- Quote: "And they believe áll Dutch speak their languages..."

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