The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #81179   Message #1500853
Posted By: wysiwyg
05-Jun-05 - 09:47 PM
Thread Name: African American Secular Folk Songs
Subject: RE: African American Secular Folk Songs
Q, "song title on the first line IN ALL CAPS" means the first line of the post when posting a song, or the first line of the song if it comes in mid-post. The reason is because that's the format the DT harvestors want, to limit the amount of fixing and standardizing a harvestor has to do, to put the song into the DT's next update.

Regarding subject lines, it's been discussed many, many times, and it appears in FAQ Joe's post at the end of the third paragraph.

It's "LOST in the FAQ" if one uses the handy table of contents. From the links in the TOC (either "Guide for Posting Lyrics" or "Posting Lyrics") appears the following in Joe's 19 Mar 00 - 09:24 PM post:

I'm working on refining guidelines for submitting lyrics. Here's a copy of my e-mail to somebody:

Hi - we'd love to have any folk lyrics you'd like to post at the Mudcat Cafe. All lyrics that are submitted stay in the forum, and people can find them using our search engines. Many of the lyrics are also "harvested" and included in the Digital Tradition Folk Song Database, which now has lyrics for some 9,000 songs (you can access the database in the blue DigiTrad search box you find on most Mudcat pages).
If you'd like to post a song, first check that database to see whether it's already there or not. Make sure you put the lyrics in a thread that has a title that's related to the song (like an ongoing thread that's collecting train songs, if that's appropriate; or a thread you start that has the song title as the title of the thread.). The SUBJECT line for the message with the lyrics should include this information:
LYRICS ADD: title of song here

Ideally, you should follow the Digital Tradition Format:
song title on the first line IN ALL CAPS
songwriter name (in parentheses) on the second line
skip a pace
then the lyrics
then any notes
and then finish off with your initials
Yes, there are copyright questions, but we leave it to the operators of the Digital Tradition to deal with them. In the meantime, we ask people to feel free to post whatever lyrics they'd like in the Mudcat Forum - keeping in mind that we are primarily a folk and blues site.

-Joe Offer, Sacramento, California-

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And it's been said over and over aagin in numerous threads in the main forumn and in the Help forum, that if one forgets, one can simply post a fresh post with the changed subject line, indicating in the post "Please see previous post [date] [time] from [name of poster].

As far as "woirking on refining," the whole FAQ is a constant work in progress of being refined. If it's been in there for awhile (not been removed in a recent edit), it's valid.

Mechanically, it's done just the same way one changes the subject line of a PM.

BTW, any time you're looking for text you think is lost in a sea of text, you can always use your browser's "Find in Page" feature to skip right to the text you want. It's very handy when you Google and need to see just the item you Googled to see if it's a result you want. It's also a handy way of finding things within the FAQ.

~Susan