Posted by Jonah (64.114.149.212) on September 29, 2003 at 22:17:08:

In Reply to: Song Lyrics posted by Nan Walker on September 29, 2003 at 19:34:33:

Dear Nan,

Great idea! Brett's proposal is that you start by using the Wiki pages to make a webpage of song lyrics. (What's "wiki"? Think of it as an open publishing system like I'm building for the rest of the Library, but without the need to go through login, review, and approval -- wiki is slang for "quick and easy," which it is.)

If you're thinking of an actual database, not just a webpage, that would be a great second step, and we can certainly add such a database to the site. But the first step will be assembling a body of data that can be used to create the database -- i.e., first we need to get a bunch of lyrics typed up. So why don't you start collecting and typing all the lyrics you can find, and when you've got a few dozen songs together then we can set up a proper database. You can use the Wiki pages to start, and can point your friends to it and ask them to add lyrics too.

One tip: type up all the info you have about each recording, not just the obvious like song title and lyrics, but also album title, release date, publisher, group name, musical genre, etc. Keep all that information in a Microsoft Word table, where the columns are named things like
Album title | Group name | Group members | Date | Song title | Song lyrics
and the rows are each a single record, one song per row. Know what I mean? Once you have a Word table, it'll be easy to import that table into a proper database.

For now, you can get started collecting the data using a public Wiki page.

Good luck, sounds like a fun and useful project! -Jonah

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