Requirements Doc -- 1st Draft

[Lionel English]

Preliminary draft.  There are still a few points of clarification.  Please let me know if I've left anything out from our discussions to date.

 

 

 

We would like to build a newspaper comic strip database.

 

Any and all strips from any and all local or national newspapers, including college/university newspapers and alternative newspapers, from any nationality, are eligible for inclusion.

 

== Data ==

 

We would like to be able to search and index from any of the following perspectives, and would like to be able to document the following facts at each level:

 

Strip meta data  -- general information about the strip.  Name of the strip. Alternate names.  Dates begun and concluded.  Creator(s).  Premise.  Major characters.  Genre.  Links to preceding and/or succeeding strips, if any. Frequency.  Format(s). General Notes.

 

Strip owners -- syndicate, newspaper, or other entities who control distribution.  Names.  Address(es).  Dates.  Key personnel (and tenures and positions).  Links to previous and/or next incarnations.  General Notes.

 

Ownership -- links between strips and strip owners indicating duration of relationship.  Strip.  Owner.  Begin and end dates.  Notes.

 

Subscribers -- papers in which a strip appears.  Publication name.  Publisher.  Location/distribution area.  Links to previous and/or next incarnations. Notes.

 

Issues -- issues of above.  Date and/or vol/issue number.

 

Installments or episodes -- individual strips.  Date and/or serial number.  Installment title.  Credits.  Characters.  Synopsis or identifying caption or dialog.  Keywords.  Notes.

 

Publication -- occurrences of installments in issues.

 

Story/Continuity -- aggregates of installments that tell extended stories.  Story name.  Synopsis.  Keywords.  Characters.  Notes.

 

Characters -- people who appear in a strip.  Name(s).  First appearance.  Brief description.  Strip(s) and story(ies) associated with.  Notes.

 

Creators -- people who produce strips.  Name(s).  Birth, death dates.  Brief bio.  Links to work. Notes.

 

Reprints -- links between reprints of strips (presumably in comic book database) and individual installments.

 

Images -- can't get away with scans of each strip.  But can presumably get away with scans of isolated panels to illustrate characters, and possibly isolated strips to illustrate strip meta data.  Or possibly use strip logo.  This area needs further review by the board of directors due to possible legal issues.

 

== Functionality == 

 

Must be able to enter/edit/search for all of the above. Internationalized/localized UI as much as possible.

 

Must be able to work on data in bulk--create installments in bulk by specifying beginning and ending dates and frequency.  Select installments by data range to add/edit credits in bulk.  Ability to add in bulk a newspaper run (e.g. paper "foo" carries strip "bar" from date 1 till date 2, matching same date range in strip history (or matching alternate date range or serial number range in strip history)).  Add stories by selecting date ranges of strips.  Add reprints by date or serial number ranges.

 

An important issue is search display--many/most strips will have thousands of installments.  So when returning search results, we want to see filtered/collated results that can be repeatedly drilled down to lowest details.

 

Example:  Searching on creator or syndicate or newspaper might produce list of strips, possibly with associated date ranges.  Clicking through a given strip might produce a list of years during which the strip ran (possibly limited by the original primary search--e.g. if we're looking at a strip via a creator search, we'd only want to see the years associated with that creator's tenure on the strip).  Clicking through a given year might produce a list of weeks during that year, and clicking through a given week might produce a listing of the individual strips for that week, with full details.  For a non-daily, there might be fewer click throughs to arrive at the details.  If the strip makes use of story arcs, then clicking through the strip name might produce a list of story arcs instead of a list of years. 

 

Main idea here is we don't want to see a list of thousands of strip entries at a time, need to filter into manageable levels of detail.

 

--
Lionel English

San Diego, CA
lio...@beanmar.net

[Merlin Haas]

At 4:14 PM -0700 9/20/10, Lionel English wrote:
>== Functionality ==
>
>Must be able to enter/edit/search for all of the above.
>Internationalized/localized UI as much as possible.
>
>Must be able to work on data in bulk--create installments in bulk by
>specifying beginning and ending dates and frequency. Select
>installments by data range to add/edit credits in bulk. Ability to
>add in bulk a newspaper run (e.g. paper "foo" carries strip "bar"
>from date 1 till date 2, matching same date range in strip history
>(or matching alternate date range or serial number range in strip
>history)). Add stories by selecting date ranges of strips. Add
>reprints by date or serial number ranges.

Creating bulk installments must have the capabilities of adding
daily-only, Sunday-only, daily and Sunday; weekly, monthly, and misc.
(for those odd occurrences like a weekly paper running a week's
worth of dailies each week). (Misc. would probably have to be added
manually , I suppose.)

Also individual newspapers will need to be customized with frequency, also.

best -- Merlin Haas

[carch...@aol.com]

Subscribers -- papers in which a strip appears.  Publication name.  Publisher.  Location/distribution area.  Links to previous and/or next incarnations. Notes.

 

Issues -- issues of above.  Date and/or vol/issue number

I'd like to add to that page # it appears it. Primarily this will help researching looking though microfilm alot, similar to the way the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature lists the start page where things are.

 

my best

-Ray

[carch...@aol.com]

Installments or episodes -- individual strips.  Date and/or serial number.  Installment title.  Credits.  Characters.  Synopsis or identifying caption or dialog.  Keywords.  Notes.

I am not sure it needs to be added here, but a notation identifying made up installment titles where one is not listed, using the first line of diagloue as the method, as a way to identify individual strips in reprint books and the dates of publication. Unlike the comic book side, make this mandatory.

 

my best

-Ray

[Tony Rose]

Good idea and something that I have NOT been doing with my Arkansas Gazette inventory.




tony

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[Lionel English]

Jan came up with another idea off list that also reminded me of an earlier idea I'd had and forgotten.

 

Jan's idea for functionality would be the ability to copy a previous date's strips from a newspaper to a later date for that newspaper.  Useful for current strips--to make a new entry for today's Tribune or Times, copy the previous day's strips, having each point to the next strip installment.

 

And my related idea, the ability to create a "template" for current strips, so that it's easy to make new entries at the master strip level by creating a new strip installment that takes values from a template of that strips current creative team, characters, etc.