Making Finding Aids for the WWW

..or Adventures in extracting HTML from Microsoft Access

4. Producing HTML from databases

Once you got your finding aid data into a database, you can export it in HTML. There are several ways of doing this:
  1. Use Microsoft's Internet Assistant for Access (or Access97 HTML enhancements)
  2. Creating a merge file in Word and import the data from Access
  3. Export standard report in RTF and then convert to HTML (using another program)
  4. Export HTML encoded report in text or RTF from Access and then clean up in Word
  5. Create a module that will write HTML direct to a file.
I haven't actually used Internet Assistant for Access, or the apparent WWW enhancements that come with Access97, but my impression is that they are very limited with little possibility for customisation. If you're interested in the third method, the Tabularium manual includes some basic notes. There may also be other 3rd party products for producing HTML out of Access, but they never seem to actually do what you want them to do. I like to get back to basics to make sure I get exactly what I want (or close as possible thereto). So I'm only going to discuss the last two methods. In fact, I'm only including the "export to rtf" for historical purposes. If you want to get to the guts of things, go straight to the "module" method.

For either method, the first thing to do is to fire up your HTML editor (I use Textpad - an enhanced text editor with HTML, Javascript and Perl libraries. I'm deeply suspicious of all the WYSIWYG HTML editors), grab some sample data, and create the basic style you want for your finding aid. You'll be able to cut and paste code from this into Access, so it'll save you a lot of time and help you keep track of what you're doing.

Next Section - 4.1 Export to rtf method

1. Introduction
2. Why use databases?
3. Exporting your files to databases
4. Producing HTML from databases
4.1 Export to rtf method
4.2 The module method
4.2.1 Contents page
4.2.2 Item listings
4.2.3 The results

Created by Tim Sherratt (Tim.Sherratt@asap.unimelb.edu.au)
Last modified: 16 March 1998