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![[Contents of vol. 3.4]](../../gifs/contents.gif)
1. Summer Issue
Due to the year's end rush and summer travel plans of MTO's
editorial consultants, it was not possible to have a feature
essay ready for publication by our July release date.
Nevertheless, we have a fairly full issue, including two
commentaries, two book reviews, three reports in our Music
Theory International (MTI) section, as well as dissertation
listings, announcements, a job posting, and new books.
Because of the time it takes for reviewing and revising
submissions, summer is a difficult time to produce and publish
a feature essay. Consequently, summer issues may focus on
other items, such as commentaries, reviews, and reports, which
are also important for keeping up with scholarship in music
theory.
Authors are encouraged to submit essays at any time during the
year, and we will do our best to bring them to publication
within 3-4 months, including during the summer when possible.
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2. Internet Focus
A recent Price Waterhouse Consumer Technology Survey shows
that, even with the current emphasis on graphics, sound,
video, virtual reality, and animation, the Internet is
still driven primarily by the dissemination and gathering
of information. The tremendous influx of business interests
on the Net has given it an image of an emergent competitor
with commercial television, where packaging often dwarfs
content. For electronic publications such as MTO, the
emphasis must of course be on qualitative scholarly content
enhanced, but not overpowered, by graphical and audio
supplements. That remains our objective.
In the next issue of MTO several authors will present their
work in multimedia, for the Net and otherwise. We hope
that our readers will take note of the techniques used,
will learn and, perhaps, follow up on the pioneering
efforts of our authors by undertaking multimedia projects
for classroom instruction or, hopefully, for MTO!
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3. UCSB Support for MTO
For the last two years, the College of Letters and Science
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has
generously supported MTO. The College continues to support
our journal for the coming academic year. Without UCSB's
help, we would not have been able to establish and run MTO
or, for that matter, the SMT Web site as a whole. For all
financial assistance, SMT and MTO are very grateful and
wish to acknowledge the University's generosity.
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4. Glimpse: Site Search Engine
MTO subscribers who access the journal through our home
page may have noticed a new service at the site. A few
weeks ago we implemented a free-text search utility
called Glimpse. Its simple interface allows users to
search all publicly available areas of the SMT Web site,
including of course the MTO areas, by entering any text
string. Glimpse offers the option of case-sensitive or
insensitive searches, and to limit the number of matches.
As configured, Glimpse searches all directories containing
issues of MTO as well as those containing past and current
mto-talk discussion. Search results are organized by
directory, and each match is displayed as a link leading
to the document containing the specified search word(s).
We hope that Glimpse will prove useful for research, or
just for targeted browsing of the SMT Web site.
Subscribers should keep in mind the MTO database, which
also allows searching, but only of those items indexed
in the database: essays, commentaries, and reviews,
though not the dissertation listings, job postings, ads,
announcements, or new book listings, nor the mto-talk
archive. However, searching the MTO database yields
results that associate essays with their related
commentaries, something that Glimpse does not do.
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5. Research Profile Database
MTO subscribers should be aware of a new service available
on the SMT Web site, the Research Profile Database (RPD).
Individuals register with the RPD by providing input on a
Web form: name, institutional affliation, email address,
home page URL, one or more pre-defined general categories
of reserch, list of composers under investigation, and
keywords (chosen freely or from a hyperlinked keyword
thesaurus). The main feature of the RPD is a search
utility, which people can use to search the RPD based on
keywords or names. Simple Boolean searches are possible.
Results of a search are displayed instantly (or nearly so)
in the user's browser. The search result shows the
information for each registrant whose database record
contains the user-specifed search term(s). The email
address and home page URL are displayed as hyperlinks to
facilitate contact between scholars.
The RPD will allow scholars to identify others who are
working on topics they are interested in, and will hopefully
facilitate contact and foster dialog among scholars with
similar interests. The RPD may help graduate students
(though not only) avoid duplicating research. It may also
help in identifying appropriate participants for a topical
session or panel that someone is thinking of proposing for
a scholarly conference (e.g. SMT annual meeting or regional
music theory society).
An RPD registration is password protected. Users specify a
password on registration, and must enter it when modifying or
removing their record from the database, the two main utilities
of the RPD other than registration and searching.
The steady growth in the field of music theory worldwide
makes it ever harder to find research topics that do not
overlap with or duplicate work in progress in planning by
others. The RPD should help to avoid, or at least minimize,
duplicate research, and will perhaps stimulate scholars to
identify new research areas or "angles." Further, the RPD
will put people in contact who are working on similar and
may promote collaborative projects.
The RPD is potentially an important research tool because it
indexes research in progress. It picks up where standard
bibliographic resources leave off (RILM, Dissertation
Abstracts, Music Index), since they index completed and
published research. Further, as a user-updatable index, the
RPD should remain current. Finally, unlike published
bibliographic indexes the RPD provides a means for scholars
easily to contact one another, and perhaps to collaborate, on
topics of mutual interest.
The more RPD registrants, the more valuable is the service.
So please take a few moments to look at it and register your
profile. A link for the RPD is located near the top of the
SMT home page (http://societymusictheory.org/).
The URL for the RPD is http://societymusictheory.org/smt-list/profiles.html.
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Lee A. Rothfarb, General Editor
Music Theory Online
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-6070
U.S.A.
mto-editor@societymusictheory.org
voice: (805) 893-7527 (with voice mail)
fax: (805) 893-7194