IT Internship (White Paper)

Web-based Program Notes and a Web Database

The Challenge

In the late winter of 2010, a music academic society in the US placed a job posting for a three-month paid internship that combined programming the society’s new, web-based version of an important dissertations resource with writing web-based program notes for a major international music festival. The timing for the position was ideal, as I needed to complete a

co-op work term as the capstone of my studies in Computer Applications Development. I had previously earned my PhD in Musicology and had also written numerous program notes. So, I was well-qualified for the position, got the job, and from June to August of 2010 lived in an historic, small college town in Maine.

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The Solution - Web-based Program Notes
 

For each of the music festival’s seventeen concerts and 52 works being performed, I researched, wrote, and developed media-enriched, web-based program notes. The festival’s Executive Director and Board of Directors approved of my idea of including images of composers and the covers of musical scores that linked to expanded discussions or recordings. In addition, I created a grid-like, website table of contents that linked to all of my program notes. I coded the webpages using XHTML and CSS, which I had learned to use during one of my courses in the previous fall term. The festival had never before provided web-based program notes, so I also provided my text for use in the festival’s printed programs.

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The Solution - Web Database

The society’s Executive Director and I first determined what would be required to move the dissertations resource from its mid-1990s incarnation into a fully web-based, searchable database. It took about a week to get the data transferred into a form that could then be reliably imported for use in a new context. We decided that the database’s user interface should have a Google-like, “one box” basic search, plus: an advanced search that allows the user to specify 

various field options, sorting by such things as name and year, a detailed records page for each search result, and at least one way to find a copy of most of the dissertations. I used PHP for the programming and MySQL for the data, as I had learned how to use them in a course during the previous winter term. The database is one of the society’s most popular website features, and it has grown to include information about more than 16,400 dissertations. See also How to Use DDM (Instructions & Procedures).