journal article database design

[bad_gui]

I'm modifying an abandoned project for a database to store journal articles. 

The original model was a flat file with certain features (such as a browse all option)

that suggests it was never designed to get very big.  Since this will be used at my

company, there may eventually be 10,000 entries? The pdf files are written to a

directory and the database schema looks like this:

 

mysql> describe library;

+----------+----------------------+------+-----+------------+----------------+

| Field        | Type                        | Null  | Key | Default      | Extra          |

+----------+----------------------+------+-----+------------+----------------+

| file_id    | int(11)                    |          | PRI  | NULL      | auto_increment |

| file          | tinytext                    |          | MUL |            |                |

| authors  | text                          |          |        |            |                |

| title        | text                          |          |        |            |                |

| journal  | tinytext                    |            |        |            |                |

| date1      | smallint(5) unsigned |        |      | 0          |                |

| date2      | date                          |          |        | 0000-00-00 |                |

| abstract  | text                            |          |        |            |                |

+----------+----------------------+------+-----+------------+----------------+

 

Is it worth splitting off a new table for journals  and perhaps authors?  There would be

multiple articles from the same journal and I could code this easily.  For the authors,

it would take me a while to figure out how to split multiple authors into individual rows.

 

Is the effort to normalize worth it?  This is a MYISAM table to allow for text searching.  My

guess is that at most 5 users will be accessing it simultaneously.  Most searches would

consist of "title contains text ABC" or "abstract contains DEF."  I'm trying to implement a

table of categories so that users who upload can associate a paper with one or more categories.

 

What about indexing the title, authors and abstract?  Would this eliminate the need to

normalize this database?  I'm new to mysql and php and I've been reading a lot but this is a bit

more complicated than the ordering database examples described in my books.

 

I would appreciate any advice.