At 09:35 AM 3/19/2002 -0500, Real, Will wrote:
I am curious to see if there is any consensus in the museum community regarding the cataloguing of objects with part/whole relationships. I realize there are countless permutations of this situation, but the prototypical example in our institution is a tea set. The tea set contains various components--teapot, cups/saucers, sugar bowls--which themselves are composed of parts--the sugar bowl lid and the bowl itself; the cup and its saucer, the teapot and its stand, etc.
Whole-part relationships are relatively easy to handle if you choose to use a PICK-type database. See, for instance, the way Vernon Systems' "Collection" works in this regard.
Less elegant, but still serviceable, is to parse a multi segmented accession number into component fields (leaving out hyphens and other punctuation which can be reinserted in reports), and then index the components as a composite requiring uniqueness. I demonstrated how this can be done in an article I wrote in the mid 1980s about a database I constructed using Informix for DOS. The paper (with diagrams) was published in Museum Management and Curatorship. It is entitled "The SWAP Project" and is also available on my website:
http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron/SWAP.htm R.Baron =========================== Robert A. Baron mailto:[email protected] http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron/ http://www.studiolo.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
