In my new job, we track censorship activity, mostly within the United States, but also internationally. The information comes to us in several ways:

- someone fills out a form reporting a challenge (typically to library materials), in which we capture WHAT is being challenged, its format (book, movie, music, program, etc.), WHY it is being challenged (text field and some subjects), WHO made the challenge and who is reporting it, WHERE the challenge took place, and HOW it was handled (the item or service was maintained, restricted, or eliminated).
- a phone call or email hollering for help. Most frequent these days is a school librarian whose principal or superintendent removed something from the shelves without any process at all, despite having policies that govern such things.
- we hear about something in the media, including the Internet.

We have a proprietary database (Access) that does all this, but we're looking for something that adds some new functions, specifically,

- add ISSUES. For instance, recently Scholastic published a book called "A Birthday Cake for George Washington." Many people protested its portrayal of "smiling slaves." The book was then withdrawn by the publisher. It's not censorship, because a private company has the right to pull its product. But it may be indicative of a more censorious time. Another issue might be the rise of English teachers having to let their students "opt out" of assigned reading that features sexual content, even if incidental, and even if the students are juniors and seniors in high school.
- add supporting material. Often, a challenge is attended by newspaper articles (either available as scanned items or webpages), letters to the editor, radio and television coverage. I'd like to be able to preserve and link this information to the original challenge or issue. So I want lots of documents.
- reports. How many movies in a year, or originating from public libraries? How many challenges internationally to the format of the graphic novel? What is the frequency by time of year?
- infographics. I've heard of functions that actually create some simple graphics: for instance, challenges over the past ten years by category.
- hot links to library databases to look up the item, or wikipedia to search for information about a city, etc.
- service history. Who in my office handled the case? What information did we provide, or additional consulting (visits, talks, letters of support, etc.). If we sent a policy, I want a link to the policy.
- ticklers to follow up on final disposition of an item or service.

Growing our existing tool would probably cost some $10,000. But all of you information gurus have, among you, some of the deepest knowledge I've encountered of these kinds of data management problems. Surely such a package already exists that could be used. We are a Windows-based office.

I would deeply appreciate any suggestions. Ideally it would also be multi-user. As many as six of us would need access to it. Thank you.

jaslar wrote:

Growing our existing tool would probably cost some $10,000. But all of
you information gurus have, among you, some of the deepest knowledge
I've encountered of these kinds of data management problems. Surely such
a package already exists that could be used. We are a Windows-based
office.

I would deeply appreciate any suggestions. Ideally it would also be
multi-user. As many as six of us would need access to it. Thank you.

Hi,

InfoQube could easily do all that. It can directly link to your Access database, read updates and of course allows additional information to be added to these. Summarizing Pivot tables and charts can be used to provide reporting. Through an .odc connection, you can have the information available to any other users using standard Office applications (Word, Excel, etc).

I can help set it up if you wish, do not hesitate to contact me

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

Interesting, thank you. Do you support multiusers? And what will your license fee be for that?

jaslar wrote:

Interesting, thank you. Do you support multiusers? And what will your license fee be for that?

Yes, IQ is fully multi-user enabled.
Very stable but still in beta, licensing is described here:
http://www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php?q=node/632

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
http://www.infoqube.biz/

Hmm. If I understand you correctly, we can buy multiple licenses. But can they work simultaneously with the same data file?

And if this is getting too specific for the general list, please email me directly. jlarue [at] ala [dot] org.

jaslar wrote:

Hmm. If I understand you correctly, we can buy multiple licenses. But can they work simultaneously with the same data file?

Yes, IQ support multiple simultaneous users. Details here:
http://www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php?q=node/1821

We'll continue this through email or the IQ community forum.

Cheers !

Pierre Paul Landry

While looking for Notemap the other day, I accidentally came across CaseMap, which sounds a bit like what you're describing. But I haven't tried it. It doesn't look cheap, in fact they wouldn't even tell you how much it is without filling out a form (which I couldn't be bothered to do). If you do find out, let us know ;-)

http://www.lexisnexis.com/litigation/products/case-analysis/casemap

Thanks. Two excellent choices I will follow up on. Like most of you, I'm an outliner enthusiast. But sometimes, we need an enterprise solution, and I'm sure that many of us have found ourselves looking for one. I'll try to remember to come back and post about what I chose, why, and how well it worked.