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THE OHS PIPE ORGAN DATABASE began its online existence in May 2005, and now that we have passed the ten year mark with notable success, it's a good time both to look back at how far we've come and to look ahead to see where we'd like to be in another five or ten years.
When the Database website opened to the public, its contents were rooted in member contributions to what was called after 1959 the "Extant Tracker Lists."1 The project was member-driven, with all OHS members asked to contribute their individual knowledge of appropriate instruments. That characteristic remained important throughout the half-century preceding the development of the current online resource, and today members are still the primary contributors to its success.
Between 1959 and the Database website debut in 2005, those member-derived lists had been edited, collated, moved to a card file, reproduced, and distributed to members for review, and transferred to a database program on a personal computer.2 On the day the Database website was made public, information submitted by OHS members had resulted in 11,225 pipe organ entries, accompanied by digital copies of 500 stoplists. Both the back-end database and the website interface had been designed to provide for additional information, including digital images, so it also included eleven photographs as examples of what could be done in the new format. Information on 7,200 organbuilders was also included, although access to that information was not generally available to the public. Those entries were derived from the second draft of David Fox's A Guide to North American Organbuilders, published by OHS in 1997.
At the time, these numbers were exciting and impressive, but by comparison the expansion of content we have seen since the unveiling of the online Database is almost staggering. As of January 1, the online OHS Pipe Organ Database contained the following entries:3
PIPE ORGAN INSTALLATIONS 57,356
NORTH AMERICAN BUILDERS 8,015
PHOTOGRAPHS 22,279
STOPLISTS 16,487
DOCUMENTS 2,138
What might be seen as an explosion...