Efficient organization of information requires a well-organized file cabinet – learn more about the virtual counterpart in this chapter on data organization and databases.
April 15, 2011: File Management & Databases
Host: Claudia Engel
I found Claudia’s talk extremely useful. It is becoming very clear to me (as to many of us!) that the rate of growing information is surpassing our ability to understand it, and extracting useful information from it. During Claudia’s talk, I learnt about the existence of R-base, that seems to be a useful way to deal with references in my papers and research in general (I am an EndNote user). Before her talk, I didn’t think about the possibility of using a relational data base to extract useful and meaningful information from a corpus of references. As she pointed out, a relational data base allows us to correlate journal articles, books and other bibliographical material in a very efficient ways. Also, and equally important, it allow us to categorize the information –especially when the numbers of references escalate into the hundreds. That has a very important advantage because we can create networks and share information without wasting too much time. As she mentioned, R-Base is perhaps one of the best ways to store bibliography.