[NHCOLL-L:678] Re: Specimen databases

[Steve Heydon]

(For those museums running on Macintosh systems)

	Here at the Bohart Museum we use FileMaker for our basic databasing
and collection inventory. With FileMaker, it is a simple matter to create
any kind of output that you wish and making changes or reformatting data is
a snap by writing short macro programs you build from phases that you
select from menus. We have custom systems that I have developed over time,
and I am no kind of a programmer. Our loan program generates the loan
forms, shipping labels, return acknowledgements, requests for return of
overdue loans--all kinds of neat stuff. We have linked some of our
databases to a bar code program called Filemaster with which it works well.
FileMaker databases are also is relatively easy to publish on the web.
These can be searched by the web user with the level of access (read only,
read and write, etc.) controlled by the database author. I think that you
should check with the FileMaker people on capacities though, 500,000
records seems like a lot to handle. Our biggest database is 15,000 records
and it takes awhile to perform certain operations such as sorts dealing
with all the records. My only other (minor) complaint with FileMaker is
that any one field can only have one kind of formatting. So if you want to
have the genus and species names come out in italics followed by the author
name in plain text, these two parts cannot be in the same field.


______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Steve Heydon                     530 752-0493 (phone)
Bohart Museum                        530 752-9464 (fax)
Department of Entomology             slheydon at ucdavis.edu
University of California	     http://cbshome.ucdavis.edu/bohart
One Sheields Avenue
Davis CA 95616  USA