Development of the Tribune Index (1997-2002)

The Tribune Index was a bibliographic database of articles published in two religious periodicals, Baptist Bible Tribune and The Baptist Preacher. The vision to develop the Tribune Index surfaced in conversations that I had with the editors of the two publications in 1997. The costs of the project were shared by the Vick Library at Baptist Bible College, of which I was Director, and the publisher of the magazines.

I managed the indexing project from its inception. Indexers had produced a complete citation database by the spring of 1999. At that point they began the laborious task of describing the subject content of each of the 75,000 articles then listed in the database. In 2001 I worked with an outside programmer to develop the search interface, providing initial specifications and iterative feedback. The image below illustrates the search capacities of the database.

Access to the database was discontinued some years after I left Baptist Bible College in 2003. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine provides this capture of what the Tribune Index looked like at the time I left.

Want to learn more about search interfaces and related topics?

Click the buttons below to see relevant entries in my bibliography, SmithFile.