A Database for Crystaline Mineral Collections

Program Overview

The Mineral Record is suite of six of interactive programs for cataloging and recording mineral data and images (photographs, drawings, etc.) from a single or from multiple mineral collections. The Mineral Record can store, sort, and classify mineral data; organize mineral photographs, drawings, graphs, and document images. The Mineral Record can print reports, print images, print labels with and without images, print reports of mineral costs and values, etc.. Our goal is to make the Mineral Record the world's most complete and comprehensive program for mineral collection cataloging. We continually strive to make the Mineral Record's professional and sophisticated functionality user friendly, with data entry that is as simple, quick and as effortless as possible.

When a mineral collector to catalogs his collection he records the specimen data and generally wishes to make labels for the specimens. Until the advent of computers this activity took the form of recording the specimen data in some sort of ledger book or on file cards, which was time consuming and prone to error. Labels were most often made using pen and ink, again a process that was error prone and time consuming.

With the advent of the computer it became possible to use databases in various ways to record, store and collate and distribute the collection data with a speed undreamed of in the pen and paper days. Thus we have seen the conversion of huge amounts of mineral data into databases. Mineral Collectors and Museum collections have, of course, followed this trend.

We investigated other mineral cataloging programs and found that the only program that seamed moderately professional was priced at several thousand dollars and that program did not have many of the features that we felt were necessary for a thoroughly professional program. We found a number of other programs that were not expensive but were rather simple minded and did not address the sophisticated collector to any appreciable degree. To fill this need. we then realized. that we where going to have to create a professional and sophisticated mineral cataloging program. Thus the Mineral Record program was born. We felt that most collectors do not wish to spend their life cataloguing their collection. What collectors really enjoy is getting specimens and not cataloguing them.

The Mineral Record program was created to catalogue and label private and museum collections of multiple categories and to print the appropriate labels for them, manage mineral images, print mineral reports, to manage every aspect of mineral collections accurately and efficiently.

The underlying philosophy in creating this program was that it must help the operator to enter the data about each specimen as quickly as possible and allow the operator, with the click of a few buttons to print up labels for all or any selection of the specimens in the database. As the program developed we thought of many other things that should be included in the program and thought of many new ways to organize and arrange the data. This lead over a period of two years to adding many new features and functionality's that made program more useful and powerful if not simpler.