Database

A system that serves to define, relate, update, retrieve and administer access to an organized collection of data. Databases are generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. While tech-savvy people typically limit their definition of a database to implementations of database management systems (DBMS) designed from a computationally-technical perspective, it is common for archaeologists to treat collections of discrete spreadsheets, which tend to be more user-friendly for less technical users, in ways that correspond with the definition provided above. Relational databases, which are commonly employed to manage archaeological data collected by a particular project, relate heterogeneous datasets by aligning them against mutual reference keys. Databases are also sometimes referred to as archives, typically when referring to the preservation of their contents for posterity. The term archive is also commonly used to refer to collections of physical records, which are often kept after being transcribed into digital formats.