Word Processing for Technical Writers by Krull Robert;

Author:Krull, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Data Bases

Data base management systems (DBMS) have made a significant impact on composing text. They help the writer research the subject to be written about, they provide ready made text for inclusion in a document, and they allow manipulation and reordering of text stored on the computer. For example, I was writing a chapter of a book one day under a tight deadline (an expired deadline, to be more exact). I was describing research conducted on the storage of electric energy with superconducting magnets. The literature I was working with described an experiment conducted in Japan, but it did not describe the results. How could I bring the text to a logical conclusion without hours of library research to find the results of the work? I switched on my modem, dialed into a commercially available bibliographic data base, and “asked” if it had any citations to work published by the Japanese researcher. In seconds, I had a list of his publications and could identify the publication that held the research results. Another command to the DBMS brought an abstract of the paper onto the screen of my terminal. I had my computer make a copy of the citation and the abstract and logged off (total time, about three minutes). A telephone call identified a nearby library that held the cited journal, and I was able to get a photocopy and be back at my keyboard in less than an hour to finish the writeup.

In the case just described, the information contained in the data base was used in composing a document. In other cases, the actual text contained in the data base can be of aid in constructing a document. The data base can be searched, relevant data identified, the text downloaded into the local computer, and the downloaded file (s) edited with a word processor to produce finished text.

The parallelism between this procedure and the copying, cutting, and pasting of material from a printed book should be noticed. Data bases are frequently copyrighted just as more traditional publications are, and republication of that material can be an infringement of the copyright. Care should be exercised to ensure that infringement does not occur. Infringement will not occur if the publisher of the material (i.e., the client for whom the writing is being done) already holds the copyright to the material, if the material excerpted qualifies under the educational and scholarly use provisions of the Copyright Act (including what used to be referred to as the Fair Use Doctrine), if clearance is obtained (in writing) from the copyright holder, or if the textual expression of the information is substantially changed.

In other cases, a data base management system can be used to move text already stored on a computer. For example, I have used the DBMS on my computer to store the index terms and page numbers of subject and author indexes for a book and then had the DBMS sort the index entries, either alphabetically, by volume number, or both. A list of 1,562 index terms was alphabetically sorted in ten minutes by this method.

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