from Hacker News

Library Science Helped Me Understand Databases

by turingbook on 1/7/20, 8:15 AM with 8 comments

• by petepete on 1/8/20, 12:48 PM

  Oddly I can trace my interest in databases back to playing Championship Manager in the early-mid nineties. For those not in the know, it's a football management simulator that, apart from the actual game mechanics, is basically a rdbms.

  I made my own in FileMaker Pro for a school project. They were the days.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager

• by InvisibleUp on 1/8/20, 4:06 PM

  From what I understand (I'm just starting to look into this myself as a potential career option), database design and other technical skills like scripting and web design are becoming an increasingly important part of library science. There's a new-ish degree, "Masters in Library and Information Science", that combines both library and information knowledge like this.

  There's plenty of open source library management tools such as Evergreen[1] or Invenio[2] for more standard data (like book metadata) but it's still helpful regardless to understand how databases work, what fields might be useful, how normalization works, etc. to better organize and understand the data in a library.

  [1]https://evergreen-ils.org/ [2]http://inveniosoftware.org/

• by withinboredom on 1/8/20, 4:00 PM

  I worked at a place that hired librarians to manage the data in the database and keep it clean. It was pretty wild, and when I've suggested this at other places I got blank stares.

• by TomMarius on 1/8/20, 12:34 PM

  In my country we call it Information Science. I always thought it's the same in English though.

• by jbverschoor on 1/8/20, 2:12 PM

  And please don't break space for scrolling...