A Personal Database of Academic Papers

Software	A database management system, plus either a programming language with good GUI building tools, or a web page scripting language.
Covers	Database design and SQL, GUI design, possibly web application development.
Skills Required	Programming in a procedural or object oriented language, maybe also in XHTML, curiosity about what academics do for a living.
Challenge	Conceptual ? Technical ?? Programming ??

Brief Description

Many academics, research students, and undergraduate and masters students doing research projects would benefit from an easy way to keep track of what research papers or other documents they have read, and what they thought of them, as well as knowing what papers they possess copies of and where they are. (In the days when Martin Stacey's large paper collection lived in banana boxes, he resorted to going to the library and photocopying papers again rather than try to hunt down copies he knew he had.) Research groups would gain from pooling resources and experiences - not just copies of relevant papers, but also their opinions of them.

Your task in this project is to build a database system with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, that enables researchers to record which papers they possess and have read, along with what they thought of them, what topics the papers are relevant to, where they physically have a copy, and so on. The system should enable users to search the database in a variety of different ways. Part of the project is to conduct a thorough and well-documented requirements analysis - there are plenty of researchers to talk to in the School of Computing, but it would be interesting to see if researchers in humanities disciplines have different requirements for a document database.

Variants

A tool with a web-based interface, that enables users to access and add to the database wherever they happen to be. You might want to give thought to security issues.

This might be a good time to learn how to use object-oriented databases, or the object oriented extensions to databases like Oracle.

Extension

A multi-user system, that can be used by a research group as well as by a single researcher, allowing for records of multiple physical copies of particular papers, comments on it signed by different individuals, and so on. Just how multi-user might you want to make it?

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