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International Directory of Musical Instrument Collections

United States of America

State Search:
Enter two-letter state abbreviation:
(NOTE: use AL, AK, AZ, AR or CA)

Keyword Search:
NOTE: Keyword searches are highly literal. This is not a Boolean search form. Only one keyword or phrase should be entered at a time. E.g., "reed organs" will return results that include that entire term as entered. However "organ" will return "reed organs", "pipe organs", "organic" and "organology".

See all database entries (Currently 42 entries)

Technical:

The results pages from the search options above are generated from a Microsoft Access database (click for screenshot) using simple Active Server Pages technology provided with MS FrontPage web authoring software. This makes it very easy to maintain information in Access which can then be queried in various useful ways. The key is converting the core data itself into a normalized database form. Once this is done there are many options for querying and displaying and updating the information. Instead of simply having an alphabetical list of resources by location, we can also generate lists by Zip codes, keywords, or any other defined data fields. The only technical requirement is that it must reside on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (MS/IIS) that supports FrontPage extensions. There are several other ways to accomplish the same tasks, but this is by far the easiest for the non-programmer to manage and modify. 

The page formatting uses the Oriscus.com default cascading style sheet, and included pages for the headers and footers. Altering these central elements allows us to integrate the appearance with any existing website. 

CAVEAT: This is a beta version of a searchable online database of musical instrument museums and collections. The sample database includes resources only in the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas and California. The data was compiled by Albert R. Rice and sponsored by the American Musical Instrument Society, borrowed for demonstration purposes from the website of the International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections (CIMCIM) http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/cimcim/id/. Copyright of all data in the database is vested in CIMCIM and the American Musical Instrument Society. The database structure and web implementation project are created by D.Newton/Oriscus. For demonstration purposes only.