I will throw my own thoughts in...

First and formostly, I do see the dt as being an excellent resource. I believe its strongest point is the sheer volume of material it contains. I don't imagine there ever being a better resource for finding a set of words for a song and in many cases also finding a matching tune.

On the other hand, I am doubtful about it's ability to aid much in terms of shcolarship although I have to admit that I am no scholar but am trying to learn (and trying to learn quickly).

Whether the song datbase at folkinfo.org proves to be a good idea or not remains to be seen but it approaches matters differently and rather than try to compete with the dt, attempts a different approach.

Some key points are:

The focus is rather more narrow in that we focus only on traditional songs from known sources.

We attempt to provide detailed notes on each song. This can include notes from our source, links to relavent information such as examples in the Bodlean Library, Traditional Index, Roud, Laws and Child references, etc.

The details are extracted from the threads by trusted volunteers and put into the database. These people are not necessarily forum admins or moderators but people with an interest and a willingness to contribute to a specific area. It remains to be seen how it works out but the idea is that it is much easier for us to spread the load amongst tasks within the whole system rather than have one or two volunteers overloaded trying to do everything.

The database itself is updated on line and the date of the last edit is recorded. In the future, this may allow us to notify people of "what's new" but for now, we can at least ensure that when new information arrives, there is little delay in displaying those changes.

We use abc as our tune source and although we still have a lot to learn, generaly speaking we can provide tunes in abc, MIDI, a draft png graphic of the tune as well as a pretty good quality PDF file for printing.

As I indicated above, I'm still not sure how matters will work out. We also have a lot of "tech/procedural" talk at the moment - perhaps distracting but important I think if we are to be able to get the best we can from a system. On the other hand, we are trying to work out the best possible structure we can (dealing with related songs, varients, etc. is an ongoing debate for example) at an early stage and approach problems when we encounter them - we are all learning, and trying to make the best use of both personnel within the forum (tech advice or song advice) as well as the technlogy avaiable to us and I am at least optimistic that we will succeed.

I do not see this as being a rival project to the dt (although I can't deny that my wish would have been for the dt to take more on board - perhaps asking too much) but I do see it as something that in time perhaps would compliment the dt and as a project that others with more scholarly interests may perhaps at least like to investigate.

Jon