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What’s in
All of Those Folders? Adventures in Tracking
a Symphonic Music Collection
(You don't have to use a THIS music library
tracking program or ANY computer tracking program. However, using an inventory system for keeping all the sheet music
and books from getting lost is a part of respecting the investment your church has made to support the choir. There should
be a list of all the choir music: music that the church has bought, lists of any additional instrumental parts, music
that you or someone else has photocopied or arranged--along with whatever licensing royalties have been
paid. Then there should be an up-to-date list of who has checked out which music and the choir's librarian should make sure
all music is returned after it has been performed. In the long run, staying up-to-date with music tracking will save time,
money and effort.
--Evelyn Pursley-Kopitzke, START-A-CHOIR
producer.)
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by
K. Christine Scarpinatto
August 4, 2007
“Design
is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution.”
–
Ivan Chermayeff
Let me start by saying I am not a musician ― a music lover,
yes, but not a musician. I am a software engineer. So why am I writing for a choral magazine? To answer that,
I have to go back a few years.
In the fall of 2004 my boyfriend (now fiancé, so you know the
ending is happy), Egon, was accepted into a master’s program in Fine Arts at the Mary Pappert School of Music at Duquesne
University. He was given
a full scholarship, and for his assistantship, the job of managing the university symphony orchestra’s collection of
music.
That sounded like a pretty good job to me, until I visited him
in the music room. Rather than the few boxes and shelves I expected, I found
a floor-to-ceiling mobile shelving unit crammed with folders of music. There
had to be hundreds of orchestral pieces lining the shelves. Next, he showed me
the computer. I thought, “Surely they have some sort of tracking software.” No such luck. They had an Excel spreadsheet. Only the titles, with many misspellings and inconsistencies, were listed. “I need your help,” he said. A sense of foreboding
swept over me.
Egon isn’t great with computers, but he understands what
I do. My specialty is information management.
My business partner, who is a systems analyst, and I examine the tasks a business has to accomplish, figure out the
work flow, and design and build software to help them do it. I didn’t need
my partner there to see that the Duquesne music collection was some information in serious need of management.
Egon drove the situation home with a hammer by pulling out one
of the folders. It probably had about 15 different parts, with 1 to 5 copies
of each part. “There is no record of how many we have of any of these parts. For any of the music,” he said. “I
don’t really know what we have.” Also, when parts were lent
out, he only had slips of paper to keep track of who had what. I
was horrified.
I knew I had to be looking at thousands of dollars worth
of music. I knew Egon would never really be able to keep track of all
of this. I knew I had to help him. And
I also knew that there was no way the university could afford my services, so it would be a volunteer project.
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I started off thinking I would do a very simple database application for him, one that
would allow him to easily link all of the individual parts to a common title. I
took steps to make sure that the names of composers, publishers, etc. would be spelled consistently. I built some reports
that allowed him to print an inventory for each folder, as well as a catalog for the whole collection. That’s when mission creep set in. It turns out that
orchestras frequently rent music. That needs to be tracked. Individual parts get lent out to musicians. That needs to
be tracked as well. Musicians will frequently request parts ahead of when they
need them. A request list has to be maintained.
You see where this is going.
Several weeks and about 50 person hours later, with lots of input
from and heated discussion with my beloved, we had the first version of Duchess Easy Sheet Music Library. It had become a full-blown relational database application focused on tracking music. It had lots of shortcuts to make data entry go quickly. Egon
was thrilled. The dean of the music school was thrilled. And truth to be told, I was glad I did it.
Duchess allowed Egon to completely catalog not only the existing
Duquesne collection, but also a significant donation of valuable music that was made to the school. The collection numbers 467 symphonic pieces, with over 5000 individual parts. We discovered that there was a total of 117 missing parts from the collection. Steps were taken to replace them.
By this point, Egon had had discussions with many professional
colleagues, and discovered that other musical groups had similar problems with cataloging their collections. The kind of software that a major library might use is too expensive for a single group to afford. Easy-to-obtain options like Microsoft Excel are not focused enough. We decided we should offer Duchess to the whole music world, so I set to work polishing the application
and writing a manual.
Given that Duchess started as a volunteer project, I wanted to
be sure that it was easy to use and affordable for anyone who might need it. What
I created for Duquesne became the Librarian edition. I made a version with fewer
features, more suited to an individual musician’s collection, and named it the Solo edition. Both are available as fully functional trial versions. This
means that you can use all of the features of the program during the 60 day trial period.
If you decide that you like it, all you do is purchase a key that will unlock the program permanently. So far, Duchess has been adopted by several churches, an American Legion band, and a Renaissance vocal
group, among others. I am always open to suggestions on how to make the program
more friendly and useful, so please feel free to contact me with your comments and suggestions.
Christine is a partner
in Midnight Sun Computing, a software development company located in Pennsylvania. To
see a demo movie of Duchess, go to http://www.midnightsuncomputing.com/downloads.htm. She can be contacted at duchess@midnightsuncomputing.com.
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