LIBRARY VBA SYSTEM

Library VBA System



Library VBA System

Part 3: Design work

Based on Wilson's (1997) revised general model of information behavior and Buente and Robbin's model (2008) of everyday life information practices, we propose a simplified model capturing context for predicting scientists' information behavior. In the proposed framework, a person's specific information action is determined by a combination of attributes of the person, his or her environmental context, the information need, and his or her general information behavior excluding the current specific action of interest. Psychological, social-role-related, and demographic characteristics are treated as the attributes of the person. In this framework, each specific information action is treated as a dependent variable in the regression analysis, and the other components are treated as the predictors.

The dashed line signifying a relationship between specific information action and information behavior in Figure 1 indicates that the specific information action is “a part of, but is excluded from” their general information behavior. Excluding environmental and personal factors, searching for scholarly information is assumed to be generally similar for academic scientists in university settings. For this survey, information behavior was further subdivided into information searching, information using, and information collecting.

While some of the predicting variables are correlated, thus reducing the overall predictive power of the analysis, each of the included variables is separately analyzed because it has its own independent effects. For instance, age and position are positively correlated, but neither fully predicts the other.

It is clear that the physical objects from the previous section - the customers, employees, cards, media, and library branches - correspond to entities in the Entity-Relationship model, and the operations to be done on those entities - holds, checkouts, and so on - correspond to relationships. However, a good design will minimize redundancy and attempt to store all the required information in as small a space as possible. After some consideration, we have decided on the following design:

Notice that the information about books and videos has been separated from the Media entity. This allows the database to store multiple copies of the same item without redundancy. The Status entity has also been separated from Media in order to save space. The Hold relationship stores the entry's place in line (denoted by "queue"); it can be used to create a waiting list of interested customers. The Librarian entity is functionally an extension to Customer, so each Librarian also has a customer associated with it. The librarians will have access to the same features as customers, but they will also perform administrative functions, such as checking media in and out and updating customers' fines.

After coming up with an Entity-Relationship model to describe the library system, we took advantage of the special relationships found in our design, and were able to condense the information to 13 tables. This new design is a database that combines some entities and relationships into common tables.

Reading Hours

Scientists were asked how many hours in a typical week they spent reading information relevant to their ...