We are a bunch of historians who have recently been working on classified archives from Cold war. In order to analyze propaganda and intelligence discourse productions, we intend to create and share a database containing data like networks (propaganda network, union network, press network, etc.) and actors (secret agents, journalists, dissidents, etc.) .
We need to retrieve very specific information from the database. For instance, what is the language of the conferences Chinese journalists, who were former secret agents, attended in Switzerland from 1949 to 1953.
I have been asked to find a solution and put it in production. So far, I found those softwares: glom, Kexi, Airtable, Elasticsearch and DBMS like PostgreSQL, MariaDB with Vfront or LibreOffice Base frontend.
- Must be cross-platform. We use Linux, Windows and OS X.
- The database must be stored on our own server and shared through the Internet in a secure way because of sensitive nature of data. So it seems we can't use a tool like Airtable.
- Up to now, some members of the research team have worked with Filemaker. The new solution should be as user-friendly as possible, because my colleagues aren't IT savvy.
- Should not need more than one week to set up, knowing I have a degree in computer sciences, but I haven't worked in this field for 15 years. So, I don't have time to code a web page front-end for Elasticsearch or DBMS like postgresql and mariadb.
- Ideally the tool should be free (as in freedom) and free like no budget.