How The Jazz Site Came About by Steve French
Typewriters
For fifteen years, a major part of the work of Jazz Services – a registered charity – has been to provide information to the jazz community in the UK. Initially, this information was provided by word of mouth, in person, on the telephone and through the post. Labels would be typed manually using addresses from well-thumbed and eroding address books. It was considered a revolution when the company purchased a typewriter with a 40-character memory.
The real revolution came when the company purchased an all-singing 286 series computer and DOS software called 'Smart'. This enabled the composition and storing of wordprocessed documents and spreadsheets with financial projections and the like. Perhaps more significantly, the package included a database which could store contact names and information and – blast of trumpets – produce labels! Immediately it was possible to inform groups of people about the activity of Jazz Services – information, tours, education etc. – simply by producing labels and photocopying a document (stored, of course, on the computer).
Not only was this database able to store information, it could also act as an up-to-date reference for UK jazz, no longer dependent on a variety of address books (although the Director still maintains his own to this day). However, although useful for producing mailshots and as a reference in-house and over the phone, the information provided by this database was not easily accessible to the jazz community - musicians, promoters, organisations, etc – who needed it most.
Windows
We move to 1991, by which time the company had upgraded its computer to the dizzy heights of Windows, and purchased Pagemaker, a desktop publishing package. Through a feat of skill defying the skills of relatively mollycoddled contemporary computer users, the information contained in the Smart database was exported into the new package to produce a directory of jazz in a readable format, subdivided by category (musicians, promoters, media etc.) and regions in the UK. This was branded as The Jazz Musicians Guide and made available at cost price (with reductions for Musicians' Union members) to purchase.
Though its initial incarnation was far from sophisticated, the publication represented a huge opening up of Jazz Services to people who either weren't aware of the company or those who felt the company had nothing to offer them. They could carry around this book and immediately access information which otherwise would have required a phone call to Jazz Services (during office hours) or that bloke in Bristol who knew Keith the landlord.
Subsequent editions and updates of The Jazz Musicians Guide were produced in the following years, and new hardware was purchased to meet the growing need of staff for computer access and increasingly information-hungry members of the jazz community who had become used to Jazz Services providing this resource. The publication increasingly looked better thanks to the experience of the production team at the company.
Publishing
Whilst progressing adequately with the existing database software, computer hardware and desktop publishing, the operation at this stage still required burning the midnight oil to get reasonable looking pages to the printer before disgruntled purchasers banged on the door (during office hours) demanding more up-to-date and comprehensive information. People had become used to – nay, expected – The Jazz Musicians Guide to be the jazz community's 'bible', and outside the information world was exploding. Individuals were beginning to buy their own computers and knew what they could do at home, they could access Ceefax, fax Australia...
Jazz Services applied for and was granted money for new equipment and the expertise to upgrade their system once again. An award was gained from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts – an organisation which distributes money to deserving causes derived from football pools levies.
With this award, new equipment, services and software were puchased to convert the database from Smart to Microsoft Access (as well as other software), and a new improved publication was launched – The Jazz Book. Not only did this publication benefit from a better organised, re-designed database and from a re-think of its design, it also had the ability to respond to up-to-date information by appearing in a ring-binder format. This enabled new information on, say, promoters, to be distributed seperately: buyers of the book could purchase new sections as and when they came available. Ideally, a whole, new, updated book should always be available, but unfortunately Jazz Services has never had the resources to do that, because each section has to be researched, mailed to, formatted and printed when time and money allows. However, the publication at this stage was very well received by the jazz community and continues to provide a unique resource compared to anywhere in the world.
In this period, Jazz Services adopted the newspaper Jazz UK, which at the time was a quarterly newspaper available either by subscription or free at venues around the UK. It contains listings of jazz gigs in the UK as well as editorial and articles on the jazz scene. Funded partly by Jazz Services but also by the advertising it contains, the publication moved into magazine format, colour and bi-monthly status, and is the largest circulation jazz publication in Europe.
Subsequently an award was made by the Arts Council from their Capital funding Scheme, which enabled the company – at the same time as it moved from Dryden Street to Kingsway – to set up a peer-to-peer network of four computers, to enable sharing of information and file storage and backup.
Internet
We move on again: junk mail bores, answering machines frustrate, faxes fade, Ceefax irritates and information books – sadly – age. No surprise, then, when an increasingly accessible and potentially instantly updateable medium threatens to engulf all previous means of information dissemination. Arts organisations, especially small ones, have been - and still are - in a very poor position to respond to such rapid technological change, even though many of them have been quicker to realise the potential of the internet compared to their big brothers in the commercial sector.
However, the knight in shining armour in this case was the Arts Council's Arts For Everyone scheme. Jazz Services duly applied for and received money from the Lottery for new work above and beyond the activities the company had previously been involved in.
Jazz Services named the project 'Open Access 2000', reflecting both the accessibility and broadening of its remit as well as the beginning of a new century. The idea of the project was to embrace the internet as a means of communication and information dissemination as well as to more fully extend its activities into education by producing The Jazz Education Book, and additionally to make its information available on CD-ROM. The company already had its own web site, but limitations of time and funds made it necessarily rather basic and not particularly up-to-date, and it didn't have its own domain.
The Jazz Site 2000
What makes a good web site? Well, in my opinion, it is neither simply look or content. Many sites on the internet look fantastic and fail to inform; many others are packed with content that is difficult or impossible to get to. In addition, many others want to hit you with images you give up on waiting to download, or have simply failed to test them to see if they work properly. (No favours have been agreed here, but the BBC site is fantastic for what it manages to achieve.) I was guided by the principle that something you are looking for on a web site is never more than three clicks away, and along with attractive and fairly simple presentation, that is what I sought to achieve with the original Jazz Site.
My first consideration was how to get all the information on the Jazz Services database onto the web. There wasn't enough money in the Lottery application to consider setting up a direct 'live' leased line between the data and the user, using what is known as 'databasing'. What we did was to buy an ISDN line from BT and became a client of Global Internet, who provided web hosting and enabled Jazz Services to access their server through a router. They registered our domain and supplied us with 5 email addresses. With the lottery money, Jazz Services purchased a server (a larger computer) for storing files, and the router/ISDN line enabled the 5 machines on the network to access the internet, send and receive email and download pages to the web site, all using the new www.jazzservices.org.uk domain (.org because the company is a not-for-profit organisation). (If the lingo is a bit difficult here, refer to my 'Musician and the Internet' paper in the business section.)
Next, the re-vamping of the Jazz Services site needed branding (The Jazz Site), a new look and a way of presenting the information, as well as incorporating Jazz UK and the ongoing developments of the company. When you're working with Microsoft products, you are encouraged to use the facilities available to you to convert anything into HTML (the language of the web); there are also a number of software packages that enable you to produce HTML as if you are using a desktop publishing programme such as Pagemaker or Quark. However, having tried and investigated various options (as well as running a web design course at City University), I discovered that the best way is to learn HTML itself and use text editors to produce it, with the aid of reference books. This is especially true if you have a complex set of information such as the Jazz Services database, and information in wildly different formats (Jazz UK is MAC-based using Quark).
So, I designed reports in Microsoft Access that converted the database information at Jazz Services on the fly into HTML. I set up a database in FileMaker Pro at Jazz UK which produced data for current gigs that could be emailed to Jazz Services as well as formatting the gigs (using XData – a Quark extension) for the magazine. I also utilised RealAudio so that people could listen to samples from bands on the site and Adobe Acrobat so that people could appreciate formatted text from Jazz UK and other printed media such as Jazz Services' Jazz Network News education newsletter. The majority of images on the site were linked to the database and wwere scanned in from images received through the post (as photographs) or directly from disk (through the post or be email). As ever, the bulk of the data itself arrived at Jazz Services on forms by post, via email or on the telephone.
The Jazz Site 2006
In the past, Jazz Services staff and volunteers have had to tirelessly enter in data manually from forms, letters, emails and telephone calls. The new site means that users can at last enter and be responsible for their own data.
The new site design has been managed by Infoworks who also designed a new SQL database for the data. Behind the site is a freeware ASP.NET application called DotNetNuke which manages the site using a SQL database and allows its content to be easily managed by staff. Behind that is the new SQL database into which users can enter their data for it to be displayed by DotNetNuke.