Creating a journal article database using Access 2000

[Gregg Anderson]

I've been tasked with creating a journal article database
using Access 2000. These journal articles have already
been turned into hard copies. So imagine a stack of
journal articles on my desk. My goal is to create a
database of these journal articles using fields for the
author, year, title, etc. complete with the abstract for
that given article. So, all I want to do is to be able to
display the appropriate fields for any given article and
then if the user wants to see the abstract, he or she can
click on the "abstract" field and that field displays it.
1) How can I create a field in Access 2000 that can be
like a drop-down that when clicked would display the
entire contents of the abstract compactly?
2) Is there a way to scan the page of the article
containing the abstract and have the abstract imported
into this database without having to type it in?
By the way, I'm relatively new to Access.
Thanks.

 

[Tim Ferguson]

I've been tasked with creating a journal article database
using Access 2000.

Why not just use EndNote or Reference Manager etc, which does all this
(including, with a bit of fiddling, linking to an OCR system for the
abstracts).

Of course, you could spend thousands of man-hours researching and designing
the database, and then the user interface; then debug it and beta test it;
and then deliver it to your users... but by then IBM and ***[1] will have
progressed even further.

I miss Papyrus, which was always by far the best bibiographic db about.

Best wishes


[1] Off hand, I can't remember who publishes EndNote -- is it Nildram
software?

Tim F