The Curious Curator

Introduction: A little history

I have, in the past, made oblique reference to my main hobby which is, contrary to most beliefs, not based in computing or electronics.

I have to confess, here and now, that my passion is for minerals and all things mineralogical.

I live close to an area which has hosted all manner of metalliferous (and non-metalliferous) mining for centuries - an area with a rich industrial history, and even after a century of dereliction, a host of minerals to find and to collect.

For anyone who collects anything at all with more than a casual seriousness, an important part of that collection is the keeping of records.

Going from a simple stock-book to a simple electronic card-index took time (and lots of cramped fingers). Advancing from a card-index program to a database took even more time. The database I chose was what was available to me - Microsoft Access, as a part of the Office 97 suite.

That edition of Access is now getting somewhat long in the tooth, now, and is not completely happy running under Windows 7 - I cannot, though, justify spending money on a more recent copy of Access. I can easily justify spending time and effort on migrating to a new database.

Over the past four years, I have played with ideas, fiddled with software and tried stuff out, with the following results -

• The available Database Management Systems are many and varied - none even approximately capable of the visual form/report design capabilities of Access (forms that require zero programming!)
• The available database systems, while excellent, are designed for vast amounts of data presented in a strict and inflexible format. Most of them are Relational Database systems.
• The available database systems store data in table files that are not, at any stretch of the imagination, human readable or even human friendly.
• Losing a database file will, unless properly backed up, means losing the data within the file - in its entirety.
• Losing the software in an upgrade, likewise, means losing access to your data.
• Most database systems can reference external files (documents), and some may even incorporate those documents within the database itself - in their own, human-incompatible format.

My answer to this is a novel database that uses the file-structure of the storage medium (disc drive) to organise text files that contain various indices and data sets (as documents), much as physical documents would be stored in a museum's collection records.

Thus we have the first inkling of the
Curious Curator for a Cabinet of Curiosities.

The logo is a crown, in fact one drawn well over a century ago by John Tenniel as a part of an illustration in a children's story book.

Why a crown, and that one in particular? A favourite quotation of the young girl who wore it.

"Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice.

The whole tenet of the program is that each and every document is stored in a manner that would allow any system accessing the data to be able to retrieve it without recourse to any particular piece of software in order to extract that information from the file.

Other than media files (images, video etc.), everything is stored as plain text.

Whilst this is not the most efficient manner of storing data, either space-wise or for access speed, it is robust in the extreme. Damage to a single file loses one record-card's worth of data (which may be able to be recovered in seconds from a master table - which is not easily accessible to the human reader)

Documents, file cards, image galleries and so on could be simply constructed using simple tools and text files.

While the software is still in the planning stage, I have broken ground on it - having decided on the programming language, platform and delivery medium. I have also managed to get together in my mind the various tools and techniques that will be brought to bear.

At some point, the project will be available for download, comment, testing and piracy from a project page on SourceForge.

And, as most things I do are - the tools and software I will be using are all open source, as will be the Curious Curator Database.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/curious-curator/

Just because I happen to like the metaphor of filing cabinets, card indexes and manila folders in an old museum office, here is a quick and dirty, preliminary mock-up of one of the pages I have planned ...

And just in case you don't understand the reference to the Cabinet of Curiosities - that is the early name given to private collections of objects (curiosities or curios), which 'cabinets' (often suites of rooms given over to them) eventually became the museums we know today.