Continuing my series on best practice in ORDO, this time I’m going to trumpet The Robert Minter Collection: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.7258499.v1 which was deposited by Trevor Herbert in December 2018. According to the ORDO record:

This is a copy of the data underlying the website ‘The Robert Minter Collection: A Handlist of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Trumpet Repertory’ which contained a database of music collected by Robert L. Minter (1949-81).

Minter’s interest was in the collection of sources that contribute to our understanding of the trumpet at various points in its history before the twentieth century.

This is regarded as one of the world’s largest fully catalogued datasets about early trumpet repertoire.

The website in question was created in 2008 and is no longer active, however it had been archived by the Internet Archive, most recently in May 2017. In 2018, Trevor approached the Library for help archiving the data contained on the website because he was aware that although the Internet Archive had maintained much of the information, not all functionality and content had been preserved; most crucially the database itself is no longer searchable.               

ORDO was deemed a good fit for creating an archive of the content of the website. It allows the deposit of any file type and enables in-browser visualisation of many of these so it is not always necessary to download documents in order to view them. By depositing the material in ORDO, Trevor also obtained a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) – a persistent, reliable link to the record which will be maintained even if the materials are no longer available for any reason. Any materials added to ORDO are guaranteed to be maintained for a minimum of ten years.

Within the record there are four files – an access database, a csv copy of the data, a zip file containing information about the collection, database and website and a list of files in the zip file. The description in the record makes it clear to any potential users what they are accessing and how they can be used. Since it was deposited in December, the collection has been viewed 139 times and downloaded 18 times. Now that deserves a fanfare!