Database Management

Contents

Overview and the Europeana Data Model

Perhaps the most critical component of the Infopoint platform is the central records database, which allows you to organise information about items, locations, and other pieces of data that your organisation is responsible for.

Europeana is Europe’s digital cultural collection for responsible, accessible, sustainable and innovative tourism, an online digital archive of information about collections and items managed by cultural and tourism institutions in Europe that institutions themselves can volunteer to make digitally available in the collection.

The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is a new proposal for structuring the data that the Europeana library will be ingesting, managing and publishing and as such is a taxonomical schema that proposes how cultural items can be described and the information about them archived.

The Europeana Data Model defines schemas for 5 different types of records: Cultural Heritage Items, Places, Persons (or Organisations), Timespans, and Concepts. The Infopoint platform allows you to create and store records of Information in any of these 5 categories within your own internal database.

For example, if you are a historical museum overseeing 500 exhibits, which can be divided as originating from 5 different time periods, you could store information about these items as 500 records of type 'Cultural Heritage Item' within your Infopoint database, and as 5 records of type 'Timespan'. You could also create separate records of type 'Person' to represent the details of the creators of exhibits in your museum, etc.

The Infopoint platform implements part (but not all) of the Europeana Data Model. In its current implementation, the Infopoint database allows you to define:

Seeing the list of all records in your database

To see your list of Database records, click on the 'Database' option from the top navigation bar, then on any of the options 'Cultural Heritage Objects', 'Persons or Organisations', 'Places', 'Timespans', 'Concepts' from the sidebar on the left. A list of all relevant records will appear as a table on the page.

Filtering through your database records

At any point in time you may have hundreds of records stored within your Database. The Infopoint platform allows you to assign categories and tags to each record, and then provides you with functionality to filter through your records to quickly find what you are looking for.

At the top of each list of records, you will find a set of filters (including filters for Category and Tags) as well as a search bar at the top right hand side of the screen. Type in the Search bar to search through your records based on the record name. Click on any of the available filters to filter through the records based on the available options.

Exporting a list of all your records in Excel

You can export a list of all records within your database together with the information associated with each record (title, description, taxonomical descriptionm, etc.). Simply click on the Export button at the top of the screen to download a .csv file of all your records.

Adding records to the database

To create a new database record, click the 'Create' button at the top left of the screen from any of the 5 available lists of records. The 'New record' screen is split into 6 sections:

Let's look at each of these sections one by one, in order to identify the type of information that you can add in each section.

In the basic information section at the top of the page, you can define:

In the content tab, you can define:

The presentation and media tab allows you to link the record with various related media objects:

The taxonomical details tab allows you to define the various taxonomical categories defined by the Europeana Data Model as they relate to this record. For many of these you will have the option to link the record with another record from your database. For example, if defining the 'Creator' of a 'Cultural Heritage Item' record, you will have the option to link to a 'Person' record from your database.

The other relations tab allows you to link the record with additional objects and records from your Database and Media Library that do not fit the taxonomies available from the 'Taxonomical details' tab:

In the 'Position on map' tab you will be able to define the position of the record on any of the Maps you may have defined. Note that you can only do this after the record has been initially created. The steps to define the position of an object on a map are:

Editing Database record details

To edit the details of any database record, simply click on the record from the list of records, make any changes in the screen that opens up, and click the Save and close button.

Update records by uploading a .csv file

If you have multiple records you need to create or whose details you need to upload, you can import those details by uploading a .csv file that you prepared in Excel or any other program that allows you to work with .csv files.

Start by exporting the details of your Database as a .csv file, by clicking the 'Export' button. A .csv file will be generated and downloaded on your computer, which you can then import into Excel. Each record will be shown as a row in the spreadsheet, with its details shown in each column of the row.

If you have selected to support multiple languages in your team, the details of each record will appear as multiple rows in the spreadsheet, with each row representing a language specific version of the details of the file. Column A, 'Language', shows the indicator that determines which language version of the file the row represents.

Each media item has an internal ID value that is shown in column B. Do not change this value when editing the .csv file within Excel, or leave this blank to create a brand new record in the database.

Update the details of your Records in this Excel file. When defining details such as the name and description of the file, make sure you do not include the ; character in any value. Delete the columns 'Created at' and 'Updated at', as these can affect the import process. Save the file in Excel, selecting to save it in the .csv format. If you are on Windows, ensure the ; character is the defined list separator in your device (https://harvestmedia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023978031-Opening-Excel-files-with-the-correct-CSV-list-separator).

Once you have prepared a .csv file in this way click the Import button from the Media Library page, and select to upload your .csv file. Once the file is uploaded, click the 'Auto match columns' button, and then the 'Import' button in order to import file details.