How Taylor Branch uses Microsoft Access to write

I was reading an article by Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books about Taylor Branch, the author of three books on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, when I became intrigued by his mention of Branch's working methods:

It is amazing how Branch can marshal so much material along so many tracks, moving it ahead stage by stage in coordination with King's actions. Then I saw Branch in a three-hour television interview with C-SPAN and learned part of his secret. He showed the interviewer his computer with its expertly programmed chronological record of all the information he had acquired from so many sources—over 17,000 items arranged year by year, day by day. The book probably could not have been written —surely not in so relatively short a time—without the computer.

That prompted me to look up the C-SPAN program itself online. It turns out Branch uses Microsoft Access to organize his research in what he calls "a notecard system." He has one database table that contains a bibliography, with a code to identify each of the 1,088 books he consulted, and another table that contains a chronology summarizing his research, from 960 BCE, when Solomon completed the First Temple, to the 1960s.

If you want to see for yourself but don't want to watch the entire three hour C-SPAN broadcast, the segment in which Branch shows his working methods begins about 1 hour, 18 minutes and 50 seconds into the show. Just let the Real Player file download a while, then you can go directly to that segment by fast forwarding to the appropriate place.