Analyzing and Checking Databases
The Research Office is a department within the University Medical Centre of Groningen (UMCG), which occupies itself with the processes between research proposals and research grants, including the financial evolution of a research project from start to finish. It communicates with researchers who have a proposal and the ambition of receiving one of the many types of grants in existence. The subsequent processes include several reviews of the proposals, various steps in communication with the grants organisations, communication with the researchers, (financial) reviews of the research reports, and many other things. These processes follow a unique format for every single type of grant, and so do the many documents connected to them.
This calls for a structured method of archiving, a need which has up to now only partially been met. The database software used by the UMCG is called ‘Corsa’. Corsa keeps track of files, documents, persons and organisations, stored in an archive. The software allows for different types of these files, etc. to be designed, and for links to be made between them.
The research office used to have two Corsa databases, which contain information on researches funded by various mechanisms. These databases are far from complete, and they entirely lack any and all information on a specific group of Dutch grants called ‘veni’, ‘vidi’ and ‘vici’. To allocate the large amount of data we have on projects funded by these grants, the main objective of my case is to collaborate in building a completely new Corsa database from scratch. The ‘Grants database’ is being tailored to fit precisely the processes and documents inherent to these three national grants. At the same time, some conceptual space is left open for a possible future expansion in which the Grants database will also contain information on European grants.
Mathijs van der Mast
