Phelps County Community Partnership Asset Guide User Documentation

Phelps County Community Partnership Asset Guide


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Netscape Basics
  3. The PCCP Database
  4. Searching for a Service
  5. Adding and Modifying Organizations
  6. Deleting Organizations
  7. Passwords

1. INTRODUCTION

The Phelps County Community Partnership (PCCP) Community Asset Guide is an Internet accessible and modifiable database of Phelps County community resources. This database was developed and will be maintained by PCCP staff. Three University of Missouri - Rolla students, Adeniran Fajemisin, Carla Henson, and Jason Starbuck, completed the technical work under the direction of UMR faculty members Catherine Riordan and Meg Brady.

2. NETSCAPE BASICS

Some basic terms you may need to know.

Netscape -- A software package used to view "documents" on the World Wide Web.

URL -- This stands for the Uniform Resource Locator. It is an address for homepages on the World Wide Web. For example, the URL of the PCCP Asset Guide is http://www.rollanet.org/~ssdb.

RollaNet -- This is the Internet Service Provider (ISP) on which the PCCP Asset Guide resides. Its URL is http://www.rollanet.org.

Scrolling -- There are two ways you may scroll or move through a document in Netscape: horizontally and vertically. If a document is too big to be displayed in a Netscape window, a bar will be displayed on the right hand of the screen if the document is too long, and/or along the bottom if the document is too wide. To scroll up and down the document, you just point and click and hold the mouse pointer on the small grey square on the bar. You can then drag this up and down the bar to scroll the document up and down. Another way to move up and down is to use the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys. Or you can just click on the boxes on either end of the bar that have triangles. This will take you slowly through the document. The left and right scroll operate in the same manner, but you go left and right instead of up and down. If you are unable to page up or down, use the scroll bar on the right side of the screen.

There are several buttons with the Netscape software package necessary to navigate through the PCCP Asset Guide. Along the top of the Netscape window are several buttons each with an icon. These buttons are listed below along with their function.

  1. Back -- This button when clicked will take you to the previous page viewed through Netscape.
  2. Forward -- This button when clicked will take you forward to a page that you had previously backed out of.
  3. Home -- This button will take you to the homepage that your computer has designated as its homepage.
  4. Reload -- This button will reload the page that is currently being displayed. This may be necessary whenever you have stopped a page from loading by pressing the Stop button.
  5. Open -- This button will display a window in which you may type a URL to a new homepage.
  6. Print -- This button will print the current page that is displayed in the window.
  7. Stop -- This button will stop the loading of a page. You may use this if the loading process takes too much time.

3. THE PCCP DATABASE

Four actions can be performed on the database itself. You may:

  1. Search for a Service or Organization (You may limit this search by age, gender, and fee structures if desired).
  2. Add an Organization
  3. Modify an Organization
  4. Delete an Organization

4. SEARCHING FOR A SERVICE

If you would like to start a basic search, you must start on the PCCP Asset Guide Homepage (http://www.rollanet.org/~ssdb) or the PCCP Editing Homepage (http://www.rollanet.org/~ssdb/pccphome.html). To start your search for a service, click on the "Search for Services" button. A screen will be displayed with instructions followed by the first table. This table contains thirty service categories that you may search.

To find organizations offering a particular type of service, just click on a button to the left of the category name. You may only select one service category at a time. If the category you want is not listed, click on the button next to the word "Other" at the end of the table and then type in the word for which you would like to search. Searches that contain "Other" will search the "Services Provided" fields associated with each organization in the database. If that word is used in the services field, that organization will be returned as a "hit."

The next major field is the organization name field. You can type part of a name of an organization here. Results returned will be all organizations that contain the word you typed into the organization name field. Searching by acronyms is not possible.

You may start your search at this time by pointing and clicking on the "Begin Search" button. If you would like to narrow the search down to include organizations that serve a certain age, sex, or pay option, scroll down to the next table. You may select several ages, and either or both sexes, and several pay options. The buttons associated with these fields will be shaded when selected.

When you have the categories you want as part of your search, click on the "Begin Search" button to start the search for organizations that meet your criteria. The "Reset the Selections" button will clear all selections that you had made previously so you can start a new search.

After you press the "Begin Search" button the database will be searched. This may take as long as two to three minutes, but is usually quick when searching just the categories. Searches using the age, sex, and payment options fields will take longer. The results of the database search will then appear. At the top of the screen will be a note on the number of hits your search made. If there were no hits, a message will be displayed telling you to widen your search. A note on the number of hits will be listed followed by a list of all the organizations that meet your criteria. You may point and click on one of these to go to see more information or you may scroll down to see them. Each organization may include the following.

  1. Name of the organization.
  2. Site and Mailing addresses.
  3. Telephone and Fax Numbers
  4. Short Statement on the services provided.
  5. Hours
  6. Date the information in the database was last modified
  7. E-mail and Homepage information.
Following the information for each organization is the option of "Go to the Top of Document" or to go "Back to Search Page."

5. ADDING AND MODIFYING ORGANIZATIONS

Adding and modifying organizations are two very similar operations. When you enter this option, you will be asked to enter your userid and password. You will then see a screen with a window for each field in the database. The system requires that you fill the following four fields. These fields are:

  1. The Name of the Organization
  2. Age Start
  3. Age End
  4. Services Offered
Be sure to spell words in the Services Offered field correctly since searches using this field with words in the "Other" field on the "Search for Services" Screen must be an exact match. Other fields may be left blank or the information may be entered.

Some things of importance when Adding and/or Modifying.

1. Information should not be entered using all capital letters. This is necessary since the system will be searching for a combination of upper and lowercase letters. Also, all uppercase letters tend to be difficult to read.

2. The services field is all on one line. If you would like to change it, move the cursor with the right and left arrow buttons or scroll horizontally using the scroll button on the bottom. Then you may type in the information you would like to modify.

3. Because of a system limitation, the services field cannot be longer then 512 characters (this means letters and spaces). This means that service fields should be short and to the point. If theservices field is too long, the system will return an error message telling you that the field is too long. You can go back and shorten the field by pressing the back button. The system will display the information you just added or modified after you press the "Modify Organization" button so you can see if you entered it correctly. Be sure to check for spelling mistakes.

3. Business Hours should be formatted so they are easily readable.

4. The Ages served can go from zero up to any number, but we suggest an upper limit of 100.

6. DELETING ORGANIZATIONS

Type in the name of the organization or part of the name if you do not know all of it. Password authorization is necessary. A screen will then be displayed with the names of all the organizations that matched the organization name in which you typed.

A list of organizations that match your selections will be returned in a list. Select the one you want to delete and press the "Delete Organization" button. The system will return a screen asking if you are sure you would like to delete that organization. If you are sure, then press the "Delete Organization" button. Otherwise, you may back out by clicking the "Back" button on your WWW Browser.

7. PASSWORDS

The system presently has one password assigned to one userid "pccp." The passwords and userids are case sensitive.