Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Migrating the card file index to the Composers Forum recordings


It's been a while since the last post, but, work has been happening. The latest work involves migrating a card file, which indexes some of the contents of the reel-to-reel tapes of the Composers Forum concerts, from the mid-1950s to the 1970s or so.

We've been inputting the data from the index cards into a spreadsheet. The card index is organized by composer, and it references numbers that are assigned to the tape reels. Thankfully, someone had the foresight to do this numbering!

Migrating the card file to an electronic listing will allow us to reconstruct, at least partially, the contents of individual tape reels. This is important because many if not most of the reels lack any contents notes (the reel pictured above is a lucky example), and are usually just labeled with composers' names and a date. The index cards provide information about titles, performers, movements, timings, venues, and technical details, although there is a wide range of how complete the information is.

Work is coming along nicely, and it seems reasonable to expect that we'll be able to make this available in electronic form by the end of spring 2009.

1 comment:

Mark said...

This is great - thanks for your hard work. I read your blog posts always with high anticipation...