As Tommy says, the least expensive solution would probably be PHP/MySQL, which is available from many hosting companies but may not be on your university server. One factor would be how secure you want it to be and another would be how much data you're talking about and how many search parameters. There are some off-the-shelf and web-based programs.

Are you (your university) hosting it? Would it be part of an existing website?

yes, and yes.

Would you require a web interface for entering the data?

I don't know?

or would some desktop program (eg: written in Access) be adequate? Entering data in a spreadsheet would work, but that would require some sort of export-to-database routine, plus spreadsheets would lack data validation that you could get in a custom program.

It doesn't need to be particularly secure, it's all public information.

I've talked to the computer science department, and I can get a Ph.D. student to design it, I just dont' know how much it should cost or what kind of expectations to have.

that's simple:

I think you should charge an hourly rate that doctoral students typically are paid for graduate student research positions.

At my institution, that rate is about $22 an hour. I think you should get a student to meet with you and come up with an outline of a plan for the web site and then get an estimate of how many hours it will take.

So I think my hard drive is corrupted. I think I have the recovery discs at home, but if I have to take it into a shop, any recs?

I have a 3GS iPhone. I would like a nice case for it - preferably hard (not soft), and preferably transparent (I got black for a REASON, folks).

Recommendations? And if your rec falls outsides my prefs, go ahead and say - I'm not married to them.

Any recs for a free sound editor program? Nothing fancy, just have a file with some extraneous stuff at the end of it that I'd like to shorten. no big.

Any recs for a free sound editor program?

Audacity: [link]

For iPhone, I have the orignal version of this: [link] It looks like they have added velcro, which I am not a fan of, as it makes noise (bad when you are working theater).

For free audio program, I'll 2nd Audacity. It can be a little clunky, but that might be due to me knowing what the pro apps are like and wanting those features. It's handy that it's all platforms too.

I am somewhat skeptical of this, but I don't browse foreign-language websites often enough to install this:

The Firefox Universal Translator is a revolutionary new tool that makes browsing foreign language websites as easy as browsing the web today. Once installed, this tool automatically detects foreign language web pages, and will translate them for you. You don’t need to do anything, just open a URL, and if it senses that the page is in another language, it translates it for you.

[link]

Wow, there really is an iPhone app for everything: [link]