2003 Web Works
By the WS Web department
117. Aside from maintaining and expanding our existing Web sites, the majority of our efforts this year were devoted to working on a massive archive database, which we've dubbed the UDB (Unified DataBase).

The UDB
118. The idea for the UDB is for it to be one central electronic storage area which will contain all the information needed by our various Web sites and other electronic libraries, and act as a permanent storage archive for WS. The UDB will contain complete archives of the pubs, audio, songbooks/lyrics, testimonies, photos/art, and just about everything else.
119. The UDB has been our most ambitious project to date‚ and the planning stages alone took considerable time and deliberation‚ as we needed to consider every aspect of this project before starting--what database system would be the best to use for something like this, figuring out how it would store the variety of information it would contain, and then how it could all be retrieved in the various forms we needed, etc.
120. After figuring out the basics, some of us went on to collecting, preparing, and inputting each individual publication, the audio, the photos, and most of the other content on the Web sites and in the HomeARC, while others continued working on the database itself. It's been an enormous job to collect, process, and prepare all of these materials in a uniform fashion, and then to input each item into the database with detailed information on each entry.
121. While it's been a massive project and has taken time and a lot of work, the effects of the UDB will be far-reaching‚ making each of our Web sites more detailed and effective time-wise‚ by cutting down on the repetition of work, because we'll have all the information centralized rather than each site storing its own content individually.--Not to mention the benefits of an archive of this magnitude being available directly to the Family through the new Members Only Web site.

MO v.3
122. We've also been working on a new version of the MO Web site. The existing version has been running fairly well since spring 1999, but the Lord showed us that it's time for an upgrade to provide new features, expanded content, and more of what you need.
123. Some of the main additions will be in the pubs area, where you will now have access to the complete archives of all of our pubs via the UDB. These pubs will be fully searchable and readable online--creating an online and multilingual HomeARC.