DISTINCTION
REFERATE-FUNDUS
Stephan Mittendorfer
Referate-Fundus is a collection of essays and seminar papers by school students and university students, which has now grown to over 2,500 papers from every topic field. The papers are made available to students via the Internet at no cost.
For the arrangement of the pages I decided to use frames to ensure a better overview. The script that generates the navigation frame was written by Ivan Peters ip@chemy.demon.co.uk. A few days before I heard about the U19/Freestyle Computing from my computer science teacher, Mag. Hans Fischlmayr, I met a German student through a newsgroup, who said he would be willing to write a Perl script according to my specifications, which simplifies and automates administering, displaying and searching the papers. Thus the search results and lists of papers are automatically generated every time they are called up. This also makes it possible to search for authors now. Ergonomics was a primary consideration in the design of the main page, meaning that the user should be able to choose from among the different papers lists directly on the first page.
Since being able to use the Perl script by Markus Wolf, I now administer the papers on my computer in a Microsoft Access Database. When new texts are entered, I insert them in the database and export the data table to the text file that the script needs in order to generate the papers lists and search results. The collection requires constant maintenance, since new papers, reports, seminar papers, etc. come in continuously through e-mail. Then I have to convert them into a common file format, compress them, enter them in the database and finally transfer them to the server. This requires a considerable amount of time, since I receive two to five new papers every day, and I do not have time to add them to the collection except on weekends. |
