ECOLM - An Electronic Corpus of Lute Music

The database

The data structures behind ECOLM are designed to give considerable freedom in what sort of information can be given and how. This is, of course, constrained by the need for data to be searchable and machine comprehensible. Often, this makes the database rather more complex than it might be (at last count, there were over 60 ECOLM database tables) It also means that many useful but more human ways of dealing with the data are united in a single clusters concept.

Broadly speaking, there are 6 major, ‘top-level’ data types:

Sources
Historical sources
Pieces
Single items from a source
People
Historical or modern
Books
Secondary literature and modern editions
Articles
Secondary literature and modern editions
Clusters
Groupings of data of different types together

Miscellaneous others include places, dates, etc.