Mastering Data and Databases for Information Professionals

Diane Rasmussen Pennington

ISBN-13: 9781783301171

272 pages • 6 x 9
Year Published: 2019

This textbook, the first in the Computing for Information Professionals series, provides an appropriately technical introduction to creating, implementing, and working with relational databases. It gives instruction on how to create a relational database, including discussion of concepts including primary keys, indexes, tables, and relationships. Guidance for maintaining data integrity and quality through best practices such as normalization, specialization, and constraints is also included as well as a discussion of the different ways to obtain the data that is stored in relational databases.

Mastering Data and Databases for Information Professionals also helps readers place databases in a wider context by taking a holistic look at where data exists in library settings, exploring how to determine and communicate database needs prior to implementation, and providing an overview of rapidly growing topics of interest in today’s libraries including unstructured data and linked data.

The book is organized into three sections:

Part I. Introduction to databases and data;
Part II. Structured data and databases; and
Part III. The new generation of data and databases.

Most librarians work with databases in some form every day and this book is tailored specifically to their needs, containing everything they need to know to create, maintain, and interface with databases without unnecessary technical detail.