Records

Think of Heurist as 'just an ordinary database', but one in which ALL your data exists (along with the data of many other people). Much of this data may be shared - for example, a link to Google Maps or the bibliographic entry for a very well-known book such as The origin of Species. Records are the basic building blocks of Heurist, describing an item

Records in Heurist have the following functions and capacities:

Flexible definition of record types (currently nearly 100) defined within database
New record/field types can be added instantly via web browser administrative interface
Standard field types – constrained or free text, numeric, date, y/n, enumerated lists
Geographic object type for inclusion of geographic information (multiple objects/record)
Attached resources (text files, PDFs, images, audio, video) with rendering of thumbnails
Pointer field types reference other records in the database eg. ‘author’ references persons
Referencing other records rather than creating lookup tables reduces data redundancy
Fields can be set to required, recommended or optional
Fields can be set to single value or repeatable
Fields can be re-used in multiple record types - naming and prompts set per record type
Composite titles constructed from field values eg. author, year, title, journal, volume
All record types include extended text and discussion area
Granular text block-level ownership/permissions on WYSIWYG extended text
Insertion of multimedia in extended text through reference to resources stored as records