Repetitive bibliographical information in relational databases
Terrence A. Brooks · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1988
Bibliographical databases frequently have a few long, repetitive strings such as the recurring names of voluminous authors. Potter [Library Trends. 30(1): 21–39; 1981] observed this characteristic of bibliographical databases in his sample from the University of Illinois library catalog. This article presents a solution to the problem of loading repetitive bibliographical information in a microcomputer-based relational database-management system. Normalization theory does not explicitly address the characteristics of bibliographical relational databases. The representational redundancy design saves space in relational database tables by removing long, frequently occurring strings to separate tables where they can be referenced by shorter surrogates in a main table. This design was suggested by some reflections by Kent (Data and Reality, Basic Assumptions in Data Processing Reconsidered. Amsterdam: North-Holland; 1978) and by the example of MERLIN [Program. 10(4): 123–134; 1976]. Telephone-book data and the library-catalog data of Potter was used to illustrate the economies achieved in representing repetitive bibliographical information in relational databases. © 1988 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.