Making Finding Aids for the WWW

..or Adventures in extracting HTML from Microsoft Access

4.2.3 The results

I suppose you're wondering what the output of the code above looks like (or perhaps you're wondering if it really works). Well, I just cut and pasted the code above into an Access module, created some sample tables and ran it. It worked! You can view the results if you don't believe me. This demo uses data from the Guide to the Records of Alan John Marshall, which I had previously converted from a Word document into an Access database.

Of course, the formatting and the design of the demo are horrible, I deliberately kept things as simple as possible. However, once you have grasped the basic principles you can start playing around with navigation regimes, cross-links, alternate views, pretty designs etc. Just about everything is customisable. For an example have a look at the complete WWW version of the Guide to the Records of Alan John Marshall. You can see that I've built in various navigation short-cuts, you can also choose whether you want to view a file description separately or as part of a series listing (there are certain advantages to this set-up - I will expand on this when I create a section on "searching".) All of the pages that make up this WWW guide were produced using the "module method", there was NO manual editing of pages - it was ALL done by Access.

Back to Beginning - 1. Introduction

 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

Screen capture
Jock Marshall guide.
Created using module method.

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