What do you call a non-technical database

Question

The German term "Datenbasis" (un- or processed data resource) could be simply translated into database, as Langenscheidt shows Link to Langenscheidt's Translation. But imagine, when you write about something pretty scientific, you would perhaps gather data which needs not to be in digital form, but could be results of measurements done manually and written down on paper.

So what is the term for a collection of such data that has not been deposited in a database of a computerized database management system such as Oracle, MySQL etc?

Answer 1

I think that the word data is more appropriate here:

Data: facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.

Data set seems more like a term from the computer science.

Answer 2

As far as I remember from books on mathematical statistics, they call it often simply "data sets". If we mention "data" it is not implicitly assumed that the collected data has some common origin or are bound together by a common source like measured results of experiments. We may try in a sentence like: In the next step we loaded the measured data sets into our database.

Answer 3

Such manual "databases" were typically maintained in notebooks or otherwise bound sheets (in file folders, for example) and called logs/records.

ODO:

record NOUN

1 A thing constituting a piece of evidence about the past, especially an account kept in writing or some other permanent form:

‘a record of meter readings’

log NOUN

2.1 A regular or systematic record of incidents or observations:

‘keep a detailed log of your activities’

Answer 4

From my understanding of the entry for Datenbasis in Wikipedia — and your description in English — what you are referring to would be termed:

raw data

as in one of the examples for ‘raw’ in Oxford Dictionary on Line:

1.2 (of data) not analysed, evaluated, or processed for use.

‘there were a number of errors in the raw data’

or, perhaps

a dataset or data set

defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:

A collection of related sets of information that is composed of separate elements but can be manipulated as a unit by a computer.

I believe that your title is incorrect, however, as Datenbasis cannot be translated as database in English if it means eine Menge an Daten (a quantity of data) as the Wikipedia entry states. Neither of the terms raw data or data set I have suggested are synonymous with database, one feature of which is that the data are organized in some specific manner. Whether it is ‘technical’ or not has nothing to do with it, unless by ‘non-technical’ you mean unprocessed. The English database would seem rather to be equivalent to the German Datenbank.