Last night I had another think about this, and I've come up with a second option which I think is simpler. I've got the two options running in two locations, the old in "live" and the new in "dev".

The new one has only three tables; it doesn't keep the poems in a separate table. The "poems" table now merges the publication information and the poem information. It has a couple of advantages:

• You can see the authors alongside the publication info.
• There are fewer tables to think about.
• Data entry should be quicker.

One disadvantage:

• If the same poem is published in two locations, it becomes two separate entries. If this is a common occurrence, and it's important to link the separate instances together, we can achieve that using a separate lookup field, like we did in the Properties db.