The Filk Book Index:

The M.A.S.S. F.I.L.C. Filk Book Index is built upon XML files, using the Library of Congress-approved MODS schema. This provides a rich set of elements for describing documents, including "related items," which prove especially handy for describing songs based on existing tunes.

Because the files are structured in a mostly self-explanatory way, and can be opened by a text editor, they stand a good chance of being usable for many years to come. Because they're XML and based on a schema, they can be used by many kinds of software, imported into data bases, and incorporated into other forms of information. This also makes it possible to fix the content without worrying about the appearance of the Web page, and to update the appearance of all the Web pages simultaneously, by changing the stylesheet.

The names are all in the format "Last, First", which is nice for sorting but rather over-formal for page output. This may have been a bad decision, but I'm not going to go back and change them all now. There may be an XSLT trick to fix that up.

A key purpose of these files is to create lasting records for fannish history. So please download them and mirror them, with or without the HTML presentation. If you find errors, please let us know. Likewise if you'd like to contribute files of your own.

As a convenience of contributors, you can grab an XML template with annotations and a template without annotations here. (Right-click or control-click to download the actual XML.)