Concordanza FAQ

Contributors
Current status

Introduction

The organ database contains information about events in the history of Italian organ-building. Each record in the database relates to a historic event, not to a single organ. Restricting the database to extant instruments would cause much important material to be overlooked. A complete view of the history of an instrument is possible by relating a series of event records to a particular instrument in a particular place or places in the case of an organ which was rebuilt or transferred. The following diagram contains a simplified view of the structure of the database:

Data diagram

Event records are accessed by means searching on places, buildings, builder names or dates. From the results list, it is possible to link to any items in the document collection which are related to the event record(s).

Synonym tables are used for searches on builder names when the "Verify name" button is clicked. Alternate spellings have been incorporated into the synonym tables (e.g. Caciolli/Cacioli). However, the precise format of the builder name which appears in the resulting list is the one which is used in the Events search - you do not need to specify the name exactly as stored - use wildcards to simplify your criteria specification.

All place names are in Italian. Some biographical data is available for organ builders.

The document collection contains the following items:

A terminology database with links to historic documents will be added in the future, as well as a collection of important articles on the Italian organ which are no longer in print or generally accessible (subject to copyright restrictions and author approval).

Searching

In general, you should fill in as many fields as possible in order to retrieve the information you are looking for since there is a limit on the number of records which may be returned for most of the searches. If you do not fill in a field, that field is NOT used in the search. You do not need to put wildcards in empty fields.

Field values

Historical event search
Builder names

Names are stored in the database in the form [surname], [given name(s)] except for names like "Luca da Cortona" or "Fra Bernardino" which are stored as written. It is recommended that you use wildcards (%) in your searches, and use only the most significant part of the name in case of doubt. You may also obtain a list of names by entering a part of the name and clicking the Verify name button.

Some examples:
Luca da Cortona
Fra Bernardino
Agati, Giosuè
Tronci, Filippo II
Agati-Tronci
Paoli, Paolo Lorenzo
Billori, Giovanni [Ballori/Billier/De Bellaris/...]
Locality Places whose names begin with "San" or "Santa" have been stored as "S. xxx" in the database. All place names are stored in their (modern) Italian form.
Building The name of the building or church. For example "S. Maria in Trastevere" or "Chiesa parrocchiale". Note that a building may be listed as "Chiesa parrocchiale" or "Duomo" or "Cattedrale", without the name of the patronal saint.
Start year, End year The years within which you wish to search.
Important note: Not all items have date field values, and these records will not be retrieved if you search on a date range. In these cases, leave the date fields blank or select a century (Era) from the drop-down list.
Wildcards

Use the % (percent) symbol as a wildcard for a variable number of letters.

Use the _ (underscore) character as a wildcard for a single letter. This is recommended when you wish to search using words containing accented letters.

Transferred instruments search
Locality

Use a place name to search for transferred instruments to or from the specified place. See the note above about placenames beginning with "San" or "Santa".

Bibliography search
Author

You do not normally need to enter more than a single keyword in each field - for example, the author's surname in the Author field and a single keyword from the title in the Title field.
Note that the normal Italian practice of indicating that a collection of essays has various authors as "AA.VV." has also been used here. First names are not always given in full. In most cases, the individual essays in a collection have been included separately in the database.

Organbuilder event details report

This report lists all the events in the database which match the search criteria. Some explanations are given below for the columns whose meaning is not obvious.

Activity

 The codes in the Activity column indicate the type of the activity which was carried out. See a complete list of the codes and their meaning.

N/T

 The codes in the N/T column indicate an organ which no longer exists (NPE), or an instrument which has been transferred to a new location (TRA).

Details

 The existence of any other items of information relating to this event is shown in this column. The code in the column refers to the type of information available:

Doc icon - Descriptions of the instrument/Drawings/Images
Arc icon - The name of the archive in which the source of the reference occurs
Bib icon - A list of bibliographical items referring to this event.

Click on the  Doc icon or Arc icon icons to display a page containing details of the event and links to related documents, or click on the Bib icon icon to list the bibliography items for the event.

Src

 The source of the information - initials of the researcher or the code indicating an archive. Private archives containing material derived from parish or state archives are indicated by an asterisk (*).

Drawings

Drawings are stored in Autodesk WHIP! (tm) format. To view these documents, download the appropriate viewer. For Windows users, go to Autodesk. A Java-based viewer for .DWF files is available from ZoomON.