The content is generated by the University Communications staff and uploaded to the database via a separate password protected web interface. Supporting information consisted of articles headlines, subtitles, author names, picture subtitles, and if the article is one of the four 'top' stories that appear on the Newsdesk front page. Now the elements are in place to determine what information is required in the database itself. Databases are a somewhat technical subject, which may be covered in future articles, but a simple database can be compared to a spreadsheet. Columns in the spreadsheet contain the various types of data elements, like names, times, dates, etc.
Rows represent the individual content items with all of their data elements.
Some of these data elements may be optional for a given content item, but there should be a minumum amount of data required in each row. Some data elements are seen by the user, but some may not be - they may be used within the database for other purposes. The article number is generated by the database itself and is used to link it to any multimedia content, while the URL to that content is also internally generated. These items are not directly accessible via the web interface to reduce the possibility of typos, name problems, etc. Finally, everything should be given a last check for completeness.