Designing a Historical Database

Scenario Description

A first-year PhD candidate writes by email:

I have been working on a database of plant assemblages from archaeological sites in the Atlantic archipelago. I was wondering if you could give me a few tips on ways to display the data and what programs are available to run things such as multivariate statistics.

As the history librarian, you are fearful that you don’t know enough about statistics to be of any help at all, but you suggest meeting in-person so that you can get the bigger picture. When you meet, you learn that she’s writing a seminar paper and modeling her methodology on that of an influential journal article in the field of archaeobotany. Her seminar paper will only analyze a smaller dataset from the larger database she’s developing, but this research direction has the potential to develop into a dissertation project.

Seeing the journal article on which she’s basing this work, it’s clear what kinds of analysis she wants to perform and visualizations she wants to create: line charts, stacked bar charts, and maps with simple markers. However, seeing her “database” (at present a very large spreadsheet) you have concerns about the data structure and realize that she won’t be able to generate the visualizations without significantly restructuring her data.

Discussion Questions

  1. The patron’s context
    • Their prior knowledge is:
    • Their motivation is:
  2. Your context
    • Your prior knowledge is:
    • Your motivation is:
  3. How might you approach your consultation with this graduate student? Are there colleague(s) you could see yourself asking to join?
  4. How might your approach to this consultation be similar to or different from how you would approach a reference interview?
  5. What follow up questions would you ask to learn more?
  6. Are there any referrals you could make (inside or outside the library)?