Tag: database update

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Database Update: Browse By Location

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

I’ve been doing a TON of backend changes to the database in the previous months, but the nature of stuff like that is you often might not notice it as a database browser. Zach, a patron and now volunteer, has been writing code to help the database be more customizable and essentially making it more like the vision I’ve had for it. Without Zach’s help this stuff wouldn’t be happening. Thanks Zach!

The major change is that now I can link items with each other. Before, if I had a record that was released from Lawrence KS, I could write Lawrence KS in the data field but it was just text, now it will actually link to the Lawrence KS page and the and that page will have this record listed on it under Releases. That has allowed me to make much better State pages.

Long story short is that you can click on a State’s page and see a list of cities that have releases in the database. Then you can click on a city and see the releases from that city. I plan on adding Labels, Artists, and other things to the location pages too when I get the chance.

Check it out and browse around!

State Browsing Page

Let me know if you have any suggestions for browsability upgrades.

Cheers
Franklin

Browse By State or Year

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

Go here to browse: https://dollarcountry.org/browse-by

I’ve just added a page to the database where you can easily search records by their release year or state. It’s still basic, but it’s a step in making the database easier to use!

A lot of people got a hold of me when I posted the map asking what records I had from different places and so I thought this would be helpful. I just finished North Carolina last night and am going to be working on North Dakota to West Virgnia this week. After that basic data entry is done I think I’ll be able to do some really cool stuff.

Things still to do:

  • Finish adding state/location data to records
  • tie location data to artist
  • tie location data to label
  • try to have different lists for label, artist, and record location (if possible)

So basically I have a lot of data entry still to do, but I like data entry and I think that the difference between a normal database and a helpful database is users being able to easily browse and view information.

Leave a comment if there’s some sort of data you’d like to see in a map, or an improvement to the database. Also let me know if you hit a broken link.

Interactive Location Map

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

This is something I’ve been working towards for a long time, having a map like this is a big goal for me. What you have here is an interactive map on google of all the locations I have 45s from, that I know of anyway. I started keeping location data back in 2020 when I did a big project to post one record from each US state on instagram. It might not look like it, but this map is the culmination of at least 100 hours of work. I went through each record in the collection and found out where the label and/or artist was from and logged it on lists. I still have a *big* list of unknown location records that I want to figure out someday, but for now this is what I got.

This map is made up of data from the DC Archives 45 rpm collection. So there are no locations from LPs here. Also this is just one point for each location. So if I have 20 records from Cleveland and 1 record from Kenosha the map will show them equally. This is a beginning, a rough draft. Eventually I want to have a map like this on the database where you can not only see the points like this but also the amount of records from each location with data about amount of records from each state, region, etc.

The other major point for this data is that I’ve left of all major labels and most big labels. For instance, Starday isn’t included here because it’s a big country label. The big names like Decca, RCA, and Capitol are not included either. My goal is to have a map like this that shows where normal people were making and releasing records, and if we include the majors then the map will become heavily skewed to a handful of big cities.

You can browse the map here: RECORD LOCATIONS MAP

Cheers
Franklin

PS. if you see spots where I don’t have records from and have any you’d like to donate then please reach out, I’d be happy to add them to the database!