<p>We have a large and wonderful high school band music program and a music collection of 1400-2000 works in total disarray. The computer with the Excel spreadsheet catalog of the music library died 6 months leaving no surviving back-ups. Does anyone have any experience organizing a music library? Does an off-the-shelf database application for music exist? Help!!</p>
<p>Is the computer hard drive still available? When my computer died, someone showed me how to take the hard drive out and transfer stuff off the hard drive onto my new computer.</p>
<p>The weird thing is that when I connected the old hard drive up to the new computer, it asked me if I wanted to fix the old hard drive. Sure, why not? Well, it scanned and fixed the problems, my old computer is now working again and now I have TWO computers.</p>
<p>But I digress…I don’t have any experience with music catalogs. But I think getting the info off the old computer might be a possibility if you don’t want to start from scratch.</p>
<p>LMNOP is right, you can usually retrieve data off broken computers. Otherwise I’m of not much help. Excel is easy to use, but if it’s a question of entering all the data again, it’s worth seeing if you can redo it, that’s the hard part, I don’t think a database application is going to make that much difference in saving you time or headaches.</p>
<p>Maybe repost this in the music major forum. There may be insights from educators, parents, or undergrads as to how this may be best achieved in terms of cataloging. Check your state music educators website, there may be links or useful tips as well.</p>
<p>Hey all,</p>
<p>Thanks for your input. I’ll be at the school tomorrow getting music off the floor and alphabetized onto shelves. I’ll check with the music director about the computer…most likely I’ll need to take the lead there in getting the tech. support people to check recoverability of the hard drive. I’ll post over in the music major forum about cataloging.</p>
<p>You might check with some organization like musiclibrarian.net.</p>
<p>musiclibrarian.net looked interesting. Wonder how much it costs?</p>
<p>lol… I was the music librarian for my high school band, and it never occurred to me that a computer could be useful in the process. Just a whole lot of paper shuffling back then… Our band/orchestra director knew what was in the library, so most of the work was just making sure all the music was returned from the band members and filed in the appropriate order. Another funny thought, I’m sure today I would have put “Music Librarian” or some such on my college app, which I am quite certain I didn’t bother to do back then!</p>
<p>Use of musiclibrarian.net is free - I’m still looking for more groups to try out the system and give me feedback. The users I have at the moment are mostly in the UK, but I have a couple in the US. Send me an email if you’re interested in using the system.</p>
<p>DDs was the music librarian at her school for three year. She also didn’t use a data base other than to enter the names of new music (lists by title, composer, instrumentation). She just used WORD. </p>
<p>The music itself was shelved in upright boxes, labeled on the sides.</p>