The Brown University Catalan Literature Bibliography is an on-line, fully searchable database of works written by and about writers and poets. This ambitious project started when Professor Enric Bou in the Hispanic Studies department approached us with the desire to improve the accessibility of his then publicly available bibliography of works by and about the Catalan writer and poet Pere Gimferrer. When we initiated the project the bibliography was a mixture of plain text files without any sort of searching capability. Already at this point it was obvious that we were looking to improve the versatility and transforming the bibliography into a powerful database with on-line searching capabilities.

At this point the database only consisted of Gimferrer related works, but we started to discuss the feasibility of creating an on-line, searchable bibliography possibly including all Catalan writers. So realizing what direction the project was heading it was decided that the old system would prove cumbersome, slow and just plain impossible to maintain and use, wherefore a new solution had to be sought.

At this point we discussed the potential software candidates, and reached the conclusion that STG's development server WEBSTAR, equipped with FileMaker Pro and Tango, would be the best choice. Professor Bou then sent us the bibliography information as two Macintosh End-Note documents. These two files were then exported as Refer type files, resulting in two data files with distinct field-tags. Then, by using a PERL script, the files were converted into one combined comma delimited format, which could then (with some trouble) be importe d into FileMaker Pro. Then The Tango Experience started... Having wresteled with Tango incessantly, the project was close to move to SQL instead. However, after cooling off for a while, Tango was given an evil look and again selected as our primary choice for bridging the database with Internet. This choice was made because a migration to SQL would have meant delays in addition to a significantly more complex structure. Furthermore, it was also realized that a move to SQL would require the system to be UNIX based. Although STG had readily available UNIX systems, we came to the conclusion that it would be compatible with the possible future desire of Professor Bou to move the database to a different platform or maintain the database himself. Thus after analyzing the long-term implications, it was decided that FileMaker would be a better choice.