Collectible Stocks and Bonds Database

This database is already about ten years old. Its purpose is to track the existence and prices of stocks and bonds collected by people in Europe and North America. It started out as a Lotus 1-2-3 database in about 1992 and was converted to a flat file database a couple of years later. Ever-growing complexity demanded a switch to the more powerful Access platform in the late 1990s.

The huge amount of data collected spawned a print version, now in its second edition. An online version of the database (see example elsewhere) became operational in 2001 and works from the Access database through "asp" programming.

An estimated 1.5 million discreet pieces of information in this database is stored in 29 tables through a variety of simple and complex relationships.

Because there is a wide variety of information types, data is searched and entered through a series of inter-connected forms. The main search screen first locates the appropriate railroad company.

Once a company is located, clickable buttons take the user to a selection of descriptive display of recorded stocks and bonds.

Images occupy huge amounts of hard drive space when inserted into Access databases. However, they take up reasonable amounts of space when stored outside Access and connected to the database through hyperlinks. Consequently, many pages have links to photos when they are known.

Hyperlinks on other pages allow the user to see autograph samples, vignettes, and engravings of celebrities.

An Access database, by itself, is often pointless unless it can somehow deliver usable information outside itself.

In this case, the database exists to deliver information to collectors both through an online database (see elsewhere) and through print form.

Here is a page as produced by Access, exported through RTF format, and later modified by Adobe Pagemaker. This data, when complimented with explanatory text and photographs, became Collectible Stocks and Bonds of North American Railroads, 2nd edition, published by BNR Press.