A day or so ago, I was looking at importing some information into LIDA from someone’s CSV file, and saw a field they had that we didn’t have in LIDA – the Price of the chart.
This is important information for insurance purposes, because it, along with the date of acquisition, can be important insurance reimbursement information in the event something happens to your music library, as recently happened to a brass band in England.
On thinking about this some more, I realized this field should be able to contain more than just a dollar (or pound, or euro, or yen, or peso) amount, but should also be able to contain information for holdings that were donated or gifted or inherited.
I’m still mulling over the best way to store this information – do we need more than one field? For example, Price/Value and Source, such as purchase, donation, or “Inherited from defunct XYZ band”?
Whatever we decide to do, we need to decide it soon, because as soon as we hit beta test – still on track for a week from today as I write this on New Year’s Day – we should be very reluctant to change the data structure any more.
In any case, I believe the Price/Value field is a needed field, and possibly also the Source field. Stay tuned for more developments.
Update: We have now added these two fields to the datafile, which is now in version 5a, and will be included with the next updated download.
The price field would be useful, in my opinion.
One way of handling price info or donation info would be to enter a code in the field. You could have as many codes as needed (maybe 3 digits) and the code would refer to a price, a donation, or whatever as defined in a code list which could be easily updated and printed on demand. Replacement values would need to be updated with inflation and this would be one way to do that without re entering data. Just a thought.
Those are good thoughts, Henry. One of the good things about these fields is you can put whatever you like in there, whatever works for you.