The New Gramophone Archive - First Term Report

The 'New' Gramophone Archive has been with us for nearly six months now. Time for a first-term assessment.  As with any such venture it's impossible to please everyone. This is my personal view of its strengths and weaknesses, based on regular use, and intended in a constructive spirit.

First let's see what is claimed for the archive:

"A year or so ago we launched our digital issue, with each edition of the magazine available as digital magazine for iPad, desktop or tablet (and in every new issue, disc sleeves now click straight through to iTunes so that you can sample and buy the music).

We’ve now taken that principle, and stretched it back over more than 1000 issues, to 1923, creating digital magazines of every single issue of Gramophone and made them available through an app."

This is the first part of the 'blurb' for the Archive.  It seems to me that this aim has been triumphantly met. It is almost as easy to read a magazine from 1930 as from 2013. A few mis-scanned pages excepted everything is as clear and accessible as one could wish (we are promised that a few missing issues will be re-instated). Anyone who remembers the old archive with its hilarious miscannings will surely be delighted with the result.

Then we are told:

"All the text was then fed into a search engine database so that you can search the archive by composer, ensemble, artist – or in fact any keyword."

This claim is, taken literally, absolutely true, if somewhat disingenuous. One can indeed search on any word, though not necessarily on any number (more on that later).

However, a useful search requires the ability to search on groups of words and numbers. Unfortunately this is largely impossible. It's extremely difficult to link reliably even obvious things like 'Symphony' with 'No.5' or "Beethoven' with 'Karajan'. In some cases I've found ways to do this but at the very least the complete absence of any guidance is a serious omission. Also, one has the choice only between searching the whole archive or within a single issue. It would surely not have been impossible to select either a search say within a year or between selected dates?

So to my verdict:

"Throughout, we've worked closely with the external company, Exact Editions, which has created the app for us to make it as user-friendly and intuitive to use as possible."

This conclusion seems to me more than justified fior the archive but hardly justified at all (so far) for the search engine.

Finally, just a personal comment on the pricing. For years I took a print subscription to Gramophone. Recently that has become very expensive if one lives outside the UK, as I do. At half the price the digital subscription seemed quite attractive, though I hesitated for a while. The arrival of the new Archive clinched matters and £40 for the digital version + archive strikes me as very good value. If I were a print subscriber I might well think differently if asked to pay an extra £25, effectively just for the year's access to the archive. I wonder are you trying to move subscribers away from  the print version altogether? Of course, I know there is no such thing as a 'free lunch'. Either everyone pays for the archive, or those who want it do so. But the differential seems on the high side to me, compared with other publications I know.

Anyway that's the end of my report! I hope someone at Gramophone will read it in the spirit it is intended!

Chris

APPENDIX

Whilst trying the archive I've found a few solutions that have helped me. Perhaps they are obvious, if not the may be useful to others.

If you type Beethoven Symphony in a search, you get not only symphonies but other works of Beethoven as well as other symphonies. You can largely avoid this by typing Beethoven-symphony.  The hyphen only works for words which are adjacent. To get Franz Schmidt's piano quintet, type Franz-Schmidt Piano-quintet. It doesn't seem to work with numbers so Symphony-No.5 is no good. Why I don't know.

The most reliable way to get immediately to a review came to me on seeing that "any keyword". Perhaps its obvious but if you can find the serial number, e.g SXL2002, enter it and it takes you almost at once to the review. Sometimes it's better to add the company name (Decca SXL2002), sometimes not. Don't leave any spaces (not SXL 2002). It also works with CD numbers but here (with entirely numeric entries) the spaces are required.

Do any members have any other tips?  

C.