New Ways Into the Archive, and a Long List of Repairs

Quite a lot has changed since the last post. Most of it is about giving the archive more than one way in, and the rest is repairs.

Organizations are real records now. A school, drum corps or college program used to be a line of text sitting on an item. Each is now a page of its own, gathering everything the archive holds from that group in one place. A group can also be named as the issuer of its own sheet music, so a fight song written for one band no longer has to claim a publisher that never existed or fall into "no publisher known".

Collections show material as it arrived. Boxes, folders and binders are recorded the way they were labelled when they came in, with the original wording kept exactly as written and any interpretation of it marked as ours. This is provenance rather than subject: it answers "how was this kept" instead of "what is this about".

Purposes cut across format. A drill chart is a document and a method book is a folio, but both were made for teaching. Purposes group material by what it was for, so those two finally sit on the same page.

There is now a public list of music nobody has identified. When a concert program lists a march the archive cannot place, that reference is recorded as its own unresolved thing rather than quietly dropped. The list is public deliberately: the person who can name a march from a 1974 program is far more likely to be a visitor than a moderator.

A recording can be pointed at a moment. Where a piece is known to begin partway into a tape, clicking the timestamp seeks the player straight to it, whether the recording is an uploaded file or a YouTube video.

You can catalogue what you do not have. Sheet music has allowed this for a while; recordings did not. A performance surviving only as a YouTube upload can now be catalogued, and every record says whether the archive holds the original, holds a digital copy, or is simply pointing at something held elsewhere. Left unanswered it stays unanswered, which is not the same as claiming a shelf.

Publishers can be credited properly. Music routinely passes through several houses: one prints it, another distributes it, and a third owns the copyright forty years later after the catalogue changed hands. All of them can be named now, each saying what its part was, and saying nothing is allowed too, since sleeves often credit a house without explaining why. There is also a role for a film or pop publisher that owns the underlying song and never touched this arrangement. Naming it is right, but the piece stays out of that publisher's catalogue, because filing it there would claim a relationship to school band music that never existed.

Folios behave like the publications they are. A scanned folio appears as itself rather than only through its songs, its shared part books can be scanned, and a song that also has its own extract shows that alongside the folio's parts instead of appearing to hold nothing.

Comments have replies. They had always been displayed. There was simply never a way to post one.

The front page carries a running log of everything added or changed across the whole archive, not only sheet music.

And a long tail of corrections. "Recently scanned" now means recently scanned rather than recently edited. Pieces written for a single group are no longer hidden from browsing, which had been quietly excluding most school fight songs. Suspected duplicates show exactly what differs between them. Year sorting sorts. Instrumentation keeps its line breaks and folds away when it runs long. The copyright page was rewritten around better clarification regarding what the archive actually does.

Many of these features are yet to see in action, mostly because I'm getting physical storage sorted before I begin to touch on getting into full integration, though I will begin to test out my existing YouTube uploads with the site, so expect to see things such as LPs, VHS, and cassette tapes coexisting with the material featured in the archive.

As always, if there's any concerns or suggestions, give me a message and I'd be more than willing to help make the archive more accessible and intuitive.