Articles

Update On The eLibrary

UPDATE ON THE eLIBRARY

Dr. Robert C. Mann

When Church Music Institute began collecting anthems five years ago and decided to create an online database of 24 search areas for each anthem title, no database program existed. We knew we would have to create our own. We accepted the challenge, anticipating the numbers of anthems in the Library would grow to hugely expanding proportions over the years. Our first programmer elected to use Word Press as a database, and this has continued to work for us all this time.

As we progressed from one thousand anthems to the next thousand, we knew that an overload to the Word Press database system would be inevitable. We were prepared for this to happen and anticipated the day when the database program would no longer serve us at the level we need. With 8, 118 anthems in our database at this writing, the time has come! It has become more difficult to add data to the system. The level of sophistication we desire is compromised by so many searchable entries, and slowness of searching is often frustrating. We have reached OVERLOAD and now have to move to the next level!

Knowing the ministry the eLibrary offers our members, CMI donors and your membership fees have provided the financial support necessary to allow us to move to the next level of operation with a new database for the eLibrary. Our new programmer, Matos Consulting, has been working on our project since before Christmas, and we have been told the work should be completed by the end of March. We don’t have a workable program yet, but one is anticipated very soon. From the description of the improvements given to us by the programmer, the new program will address the concerns we have had in the past and move us to a heretofore impossible level of efficiency and user ease.

It is our hope that you won’t know anything is happening with the new system when you use it and that everything will continue to work without a hitch. The only changes may possibly be in layout and definitely in a faster speed to complete each search. I can’t say more until I see a proto type system and respond to the changes and improvements made. The purpose of this information is to let you know that we at CMI are “way over the moon” in anticipation of the completion of the new database for the eLibrary. We are grateful that you find our system useful in planning exciting worship and that you support our efforts to provide this information to you. We thank you for your patience during these formative years of creating the eLibrary database, and we hope the new product will be a vastly improved search tool we will enjoy using. As always, please let us know what needs to be done to improve the system, what is and isn’t working, and other comments you might have. Tell your professional colleagues about us and eLibrary.