PT Journal Index - more

[John Baird]

Dear List,

A short recap...then more background on the Frank Emerson Index.

The Frank Emerson Index that I will be demonstrating at the Cybercafe in
Providence is a - huge - resource! This a periodical index of 13,675
articles of interest to piano technicians from 31 journals. All but
about 300 of those are from either our former journal, The Piano
Technician (May 1946 to Dec 1957), or our current journal, Piano
Technicians Journal (Jan 1958 to the current issue). This index is the
result of many years of effort by Frank Emerson, RPT. He has graciously
turned his index over to PTG.

The ECC's plan is to include this index on the CD-ROM of 15 years of
Journal articles (with the passage of time maybe that’s grown to 16
years now<g>). It could also be distributed on diskette. In zipped form
the database file is .5MB in size. This then unzips into a 4.5MB file.
Frank's wish is that his index will be helpful to the committee and to
the rest of PTG, and his one request is that it be available only to the
membership. It's a .dbf file that can be imported to all kinds of
programs like MS Access, File Maker Pro, etc. Question: How many in the
general membership know how to use a database? Maybe Bill Ballard is
right that most people would be happy enough doing text searches with a
word processor.

Since Frank Emerson discontinued maintaining the database in May 1995, I
have been working with it, doing such things as deleting duplicate
records, merging the small index that the Home Office maintains for its
purposes, modifying the structure, updating, etc. 

The Home Office index has recently started omitting such Journal
features as Steve Brady's book reviews and comments in Editorial
Perspective, the President's Message, and death notices in Passages.
Frank was diligent about including all this stuff. Having this material
may not be of much interest to those looking only for technical
information, but it does make other kinds of research possible. These
recent omissions may not matter as much when we have the complete 16
years of Journals on a searchable CD. On the other hand, I don't know
yet if the search and report functions of the PDF file on a CD-ROM are
as flexible as what you can do with a database file.

Each record in the database has eight fields that can be searched:
KEYWORDS, AUTHOR, TITLE, PUBLICATION, MONTH, PAGE, SERIES, AND CATEGORY.
The KEYWORDS field is especially useful. If you were searching for
information on "touchweight", for instance, you may miss some articles
by searching only on the TITLE field, since the term "touchweight" does
not necessarily appear in the title of all the articles which deal with
that subject. However, a search on the KEYWORDS field will result in
more "finds".

John Baird, Member
PTG Electronic Communications Committee