International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Actes du XIVe Congrès International des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Beograd 15-20 septembre 1980.

Beograd : 1982.

ISSN 0361-7500

Heinrich Huesmann

The TANDEM Theatre Information System

pp. 80-97

The problem imposed by the theatre upon the discipline of theatre studies, that of gaining information on a subject which does not exist in its original form, has met with an extraordinarily slow response on the part of historical theatre studies. We are referring here to theatre studies within the German-speaking area. The stereotyped conclusion propounded now for several decades, to pursue studies in a trite, unimaginative fashion with no tangible facts of a material or intellectual nature, has, along with the intricacy of the transitory art theatre and the coincidence in terms of both time and content between developmental and speculative strands, proportionally led to a neglect of the central theme of theatre studies, production, and opened up the way to an emphasis on more easily surveyed fringe topics such as the motifs of works, abstracted stylistic trends, stage design, actors, singers, criticism and essayistic conversation pieces. This set of problems is peculiar to the theatre and, with the exception of music, does not affect the other arts to the same degree because of the simpler structure of their subject matter. The
documentation of so complex an artistic organism as the theatre could not - in retrospect - be achieved by conventional means.

The amorphous heaps of unmastered, unrelated items of information in the archives made the resignation of archivists both regular and inevitable. Material was collected more or less eclectically, depending on what happened to be available at the time. Any initially existing information networks capable of relating theatrical material to productions broke down after only a few years due to the lack of satisfactory systems for expanding them. Conventional card-index catalogues were found to be inflexible and unresponsive, and to set them up required an economic expenditure which was quite unreasonable.

On taking stock of the instruments of information and documentation in the theatrical sphere, then, the critic will start out from the justified conclusion that, until the advent of third generation computers with their dialogue capacity, it was virtually impossible to deal with more than three aspects of a question simultaneously using conventional means. The fact that, in addition to and irrespectively of this, those organs of information which could be mastered by conventional means were offering a remarkably wide-meshed supply of information of equally remarkably constant unreliability, can be put down to the mania for individuation cherished by earlier generations of researchers and to the desolate organisational structure of the discipline as a whole which this involved. All this is applicable from our point of view to the German-speaking theatre world, and the consequence was that any feedback of the results of theatre studies into theatrical practice has taken place on an infinitesimal scale.

It is thus not without good reason that German theatres have begun, in the last few decades, to bypass traditional theatre studies and to create and publish their own organs of documentation. The discipline has thereby started to withdraw from the productive process of the theatre and to degenerate at best to a training centre for stage practicians with only theoretical knowledge.

The situation regarding fundamental information in the theatrical sphere - and this applies equally to theatrical practice and to theatre studies - is characterised by desiderata.

There is no continuous record of productions. Individual records which do exist are casual documents limited in time and place. The essential basis for serious research is therefore lacking; there is no insight into the history, development and continuity of the theatre, and no way of defining current positions and justifying them in recognisable detachment from the historical facts.

There is no basis on which to allocate the material in the archives. This situation on the one hand gives rise to a highly uneconomical effort, bordering on resignation, in researching basic facts every time a new research attempt is made, if the result is to be at all serious; individual research as the foundation of a further-reaching research project has served its purpose and is lost as soon as the final result is published. The same effort will be undertaken again for the next research attempt in the same field, with equally transient success. On the other hand, the deficit of facts tempts students into belletristic interpretation of hypothetically placed theatre. The method gained encourages a plethora of literature which has not only become a tradition, but is inflated by the extent to which these products of speculation are compiled.

No object file exists. The working bases available in German language archives for both those active in the theatre and those engaged in theatre studies remain for the most part inaccessible. It is almost impossible to match them with historic productions unless an unwarrantably great research effort is made. The German-language theatre collections thus possess an impenetrable arsenal of what the technical jargon has resigned itself to terming "archive corpses" - material which is completely unfit for use. The necrophilia of the keepers of theatre archives, inevitable in view of the present situation, means that the perception of important details and their context in the historical sphere of German theatre is hindered, history is distorted under the spell of disproportionate information, and the inspirational and at the same time controlling momentum for the creative theatre of the present day is lost.

There is no index of names or artists. The attempt by Wilhelm Kosch to compile a theatrical encyclopaedia with no regional or chronological boundaries, which was in any case of a more literary nature, fell into a coma at the letter S some ten years ago, and has not yet regained consciousness. Even in the existing torso, the network of information leaves too many gaps. Not even the beginnings of a standard work such as the Italian Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo are to be found on the German cultural scene.

There is no index of works. The popular drama and opera lexicons for theatregoers can be disregarded. Gregor's Schauspielführer, with about 2,000 titles (compared to about 155,000 in the index of the Enciclopedia), does not venture beyond the very nucleus of classical and modern literature. Allgayer's Dramenlexikon, which has a limited selection of works, has serious gaps and false information which restrict its usefulness still further.

Press records are uneconomic, chaotic and short-lived. Present-day collecting systems being what they are, the material, and thus the information, lasts scarcely half a century. There is no retrieval system for the purposeful selective output of press information.

No specialised bibliography exists. Only in Vienna, Munich and Frankfurt are there serviceable conventional catalogues of stocks owned by those cities which are of supraregional importance.

Only the German Bühnenjahrbuch (Year Book of the Stage), published by the Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühnenangehörigen, provides a regularly issued list of theatre engagements, associations and institutions, selected personal news, and information on premieres and first public performances.

There are no alternative solutions.

This was the reason why, on the fringes of the XIIth International Congress of SIBMAS in Vienna in 1976, the members of the National Centre of the Federal Republic of Germany resolved to take a first step towards reorganising the entire discipline by making the introduction of the TANDEM theatre information system uniform and obligatory for the institutes in the Federal Republic of Germany. This system, developed under the auspices of the Deutsches Theatermuseum with the participation of the major theatrical collections and of the practical theatre in Germany, then taken on and expanded with extraordinary dedication by Thomas Siedhoff, first in Frankfurt and later in Bayreuth, consisted in 1976 of only two file groups: productions and objects. His expansion was based on the idea of systematically registering the data of productions within the German-speaking area as the economical counterpart to the production-related objects; and where the objects were concerned, to record merely the specific object data such as the type of object, originator/artist, measurements and signatures, and to link these to the production data in any desired combination using a system of identification numbers. The production card itself was to contain all data and facts pertaining to the productive or creative, but not the mechanical, process of a theatrical production, determining its identical physiognomy. The main feature of the system - hence the name TANDEM - was its capacity for unrestricted, fully flexible operation in dialogue mode, using any category of information from either of the two files to obtain the desired depth of information from both files. Thus it provided the possibility of obtaining an initial answer to a question by the use of free catchwords - not of mandatory descriptors - and then of obtaining, as required, all the information available on an individual production, or specific, selected results. So great is the flexibility of the system that fragments of titles, names or designations can be supplemented by the truncating process to give their full wording, thereby instituting a search.

One of the main problems in setting up a central, comprehensive theatre information system was posed by the eventlike character of productions. Hitherto existing models such as the documentation of objects, persons or literature could be taken over in certain areas of the overall system, but not in the area of production or mise en scene. This circumstance necessitated, and will continue for some time to necessitate, software development work on a large scale, requiring a considerable financial investment, and so high a standard of technical expertise that even the staff of the computer manufactures approached were unable to provide it. It was therefore a particular stroke of luck when, in the 1978/79 season, the Federal Government- and Länder-owned Gesellschaft für Information und Dokumentation in Frankfurt am Main, Section of Technology, discovered the field of event documentation, so problematic for the theatre, as a new field of technical research for itself, and an obviously fruitful cooperation for both parties, technology and the theatre, sprang up. The presentation of the TANDEM theatre information system which is being attempted here today is largely due to the technical achievements and hard work of the GID staff members present here in Belgrade, Frau Brühl, Herr Dr. Meder and Herr Hartmann.

The nature and structure of the items of information, recorded in the data bank will be seen from the provided. Altogether, eight separate files are planned. They are:

1. A production file (containing all facts, data and names which determine the identity of a production). The data structure can be seen from the A4-sized form with red print.
2. An object file (containing all collecting objects related to a production, such as stage design sketches, costume designs, prompt books, ground plans of the stage, photographs, gramophone records, tapes, films etc., and objects bearing no immediate reference to a production such as portraits, autographs etc.). The data structure can be seen from the A5-sized form with red print.
3. An artist file (theatre people, critics, theorists, authors, composers). The data structure can be seen from the A4-sized form with green print.
4. A work title file (with basic information on the title, structure of the work, publication rights, editions etc.). The data structure can be seen from the A4-sized form with brown print.
5. A work title catalogue (containing title, author, abbreviated name of institute, location number, etc.). The data structure can be seen from the A5-sized form with brown print. This form is being developed at present and could not be finished in time for Belgrade.
6. A press file (reviews, news items, programme announcements). No concrete development has been yet undertaken.
7. A literature file (secondary literature, periodicals, programmes). The first steps towards development have been taken.
8. A season file (theatrical engagements). No concrete development has been undertaken in this sphere. On the other hand, as already mentioned, there exists a record of engagements since the early 19th century, published continuously in annual volumes, in the form of the Deutsches Bühnenjahrbuch and its predecessors. Even though the research can only be put to its fullest use, including mass selection and cross-connections, when the complex of information from the Deutsches Bühnenjahrbuch is linked to the other files, the mechanical registration of the season file is not envisaged for the time being.

In view of the rapidly swelling flood of information, problems are today arising even for those  fields which, unlike the theatre for several decades now, do not suffer from an organisational structure littered with desiderata. If we quantify the amount of scientific and technical information existing in 1955 on the basis of 100, we find an increase to approximately 1,200 at present, and we may expect a quota of about 1,750 in 1985. To quote from Inforum (No, 1, April 1979), this "continuously rising flood of scientific and technical literature of different origins and languages, and the discovery, procurement and analysis of the relevant literature, are increasingly becoming a problem for the seeker of information. The growing effort necessary in order to be selective makes it proportionately more difficult to use scientific findings in solving political, economic and social problems. On the other hand, though, the need for specialised information in the various spheres of society is becoming broader and more differentiated all the time". The same may be said of primary sources.

To create an efficient information network with a wide range of information on literature, data, projects etc., the Federal Government decided to adopt the programme for the promotion of information and documentation (I and D Programme 1974), the aims of which are as follows: 

• to increase the efficiency of research, development and training, and to accelerate innovation; 
•  to strengthen the productivity of commerce  and technology;
• to support public bodies in their work of  planning and decision-making;
• to improve the information facilities for the  media, citizens, and social groups;
• to promote the international exchange of in formation.

1. Public health, medicine, biology, sports
2. Nutrition, agriculture and forestry
3. Chemistry
4. Energy, physics, mathematics
5. Metallurgy, materials and metalworking
6. Extraction of raw materials, geological  sciences
7. Communications
8. Area planning, civil engineering, town planning
9. Consumer goods
10. Economics
11. Law
12. Education
13. Social sciences
14. Arts
15. Science of states, intergovernmental and international relations
16. Electrical engineering, precision engineering, mechanical engineering

The field of theatre comes under specialised information system no. 14. The planning report commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology structures this into six subject groups containing the following subjects:
 

Subject groups	Subjects (fields of specialised information)
Subject group 1	- Philosophy  - Theory of science  - Religious science  - Theology     etc.
Subject group 2	- General linguistics  - General and comparative literature  - Indo-European linguistics  - Albanology and Balkan linguistics  - Classical philology  - Papyrology  - German language and literature  - English language and literature  - American studies  - Celtic studies  - Sanskrit philology  - Tocharian studies  - Romance languages and literatures  - Slavonic languages and literatures  - Semito-Hamitic languages  - Turcology     etc.
Subject group 3	- Japanology  - Sinology  - South-East Asiatic languages  - Indology  - Iranian studies  - Islamic studies  - African studies  - Ethnology     etc.
Subject group 4	- Near Eastern archaeology  - Egyptian archaeology (Egyptology)  - Prehistory and primitive history  - Classical archaeology (including Etruscan and Mycenian studies, early history and cultures of the Mediterranean area)  - Provincial Roman archaeology  - Medieval archaeology  - History of art  - Folklore     etc.
Subject group 5	- Ancient history  - Medieval history  - Modern history  - Contemporary history  - History of individual countries  - East European, Chinese, Japanese, American history etc. (history of all world regions) - Social and economic history  - Legal, constitutional and administrative history  - History of international relations, military history  - Complementary subjects to the study of history (palaeography, diplomatics, numismatics heraldry, archive studies)   etc.
Subject group 6	- Musicology  - Theatre studies     etc.

In West Germany, Austria and Switzerland there are now about 32,000 persons with professional and higher education working in the sphere of the theatre alone - not counting the media of film, radio and television, or orchestral musicians. Their inarticulate need for information, inarticulate because of the lack of information services, ends in lethargy. Even articulate requests for information from active theatrical circles can, with the scientific instruments currently available, be satisfied to an increasing degree only incompletely, partially or not at all. The socio-political relevance of the information deficit intensifies in proportion to the supply or lack of information in the heads of the propagators of film, radio and television, of publishing staff and of agents of the journalistic medium. That the discipline of theatre studies is anxious to expand its information services both qualitatively and quantitatively as regards the subjects bordering on the various literatures, such as German, English, Romance and Slavonic studies, aesthetics, psychology, psychophysiology, electrical engineering, theatre law, musicology etc., is due not only to its scientific conception of itself and to its task of imparting knowledge, but bears upon the question of survival in an atmosphere of anything but harmless competition. The fact that, added to this, even so-called ordinary citizens have a right to information services, is something with which - even if the process was slow and not entirely painless - we have meanwhile come to terms.

The main aim of TANDEM, and the basis on which it operates, is that of being absolutely up to date. To defer the storage, and with it the provision, of information would be to block important areas of practical use. Casting problems in the artistic management office, recastings types of roles (Rollen profile) played by unknown performers, particularly outstanding interpretations, details of work titles, publishing rights and conditions of purchase, investigations of titles, repertoire analyses, particulars of the formal structures of works -- all these are ineffective, and it is of little use to select them, if they fail to include the latest state of affairs. Incidentally, this is true not only in theatrical practice but likewise applies to the users in the fields of press, radio and television.

The second postulate is that of complexity, a fundamental requirement for both the practice and the study of the theatre. Selection as a deliberate process of scientific valuation can only be a step in a scientific procedure; it can never be the premise for inquiry procedures, which, if this fundamental requirement is neglected, will be no more than products of speculation.

A broad scope of operations, the unobstructed linkage, in any desired combination, of all relevant single facts in the data bank, both linking the individual files themselves and moving unrestrictedly through the files, any desired cross references, any desired chronological, alphabetical or alphanumerical classifications of subgroupings - these are the results of the dialogue capacity developed in the computers of the 3rd generation. TANDEM has fully absorbed these capabilities. 

Particularly in the sphere of the arts, the profitability of information and documentation services has traditionally been a very difficult question. Without a doubt, the TANDEM system is unlikely to bring a saving in budgetary funds in the foreseeable future. According to the presently available data, additional funds amounting to between 600,000 and 700,000 DM per year will be required for the fields of theatre alone. However, the fact that adjacent areas of music and literature will at the same time be covered relativises the expenditure for the one subject and underlines the indispensability of inter-disciplinal cooperation.

About 90% of the necessary annual budget will be used in improving the efficiency of the I and D (information and documentation) subject "theatre". It is hardly likely that more than the remaining 10% need be quoted for the adoption of conventionally arranged services.

When considering the profitability aspect, however, the argument cannot be focused solely on the question of rationalisation and the saving of personnel and resources which this entails, as long as the discipline of theatre is unable to fulfill its obligation to supply information while possessing only conventional means. The useful effect for the national economy as a whole will best be reflected in the figures achieved as a backflow of capital for services rendered if adequate investments were made in the development phase. The rationalisation effect certainly promotes greater standardisation of work on which international cooperation can be based.

International cooperation in this sense may involve:

• buying, selling or exchanging entire packages of information;
• joint data acquisition and charging of the data bank according to definite agreed criteria (as will be the case from September 1980 onwards when Germany and Austria begin working together);
• memory leasing in the case of national data acquisition;
• aid with system generation for creating a national information bank;
• system management,

In order to be of truly international calibre, and to preserve names of persons, roles, and titles of works as precise and unmistakable pieces of information, the TANDEM system endeavours, despite major technical obstacles, to keep the original language in its authentic version with its specific characters and diacritical marks. Keyboards, data display terminals and high-speed printers are at a stage of development which lags far behind the requirements of the theatre, if not others, in this respect. Nevertheless, even now there are auxiliary constructions which enable texts and names in over 30 cultural languages of Europe and the rest of the world to be recorded in their original version with the aid of the international transliteration system. The experimental data bank which we have at our disposal today does not yet meet the criteria of the system, Neither capital and small lettering, nor ordinary umlauts, nor diacritical marks are as yet available. Questions which to some extent require a political answer, such as that of the computer systems, are still undecided. The work of developing TANDEM is being conducted on an IBM computer using the STAIRS system. It cannot yet be foreseen whether some other system, such as perhaps GRIPS/DIRS, which has proved so useful in the fields of medicine and mathematics, will be adopted in the future and TANDEM thereby be restructured. TANDEM is not a monolithic unit, but a process of development which will continue for an as yet unforeseeable number of years. One hopes that the flexibility inherent in the system will prove adequate for coping with modifications arising from the information requirements of a later era.

Regular data acquisition, without the specific character of an experiment, started at the beginning of 1980. One person in Munich is occupied exclusively with the acquisition of work titles data, while in Bayreuth the primary task is to acquire the titles of musical theatre works and all successive productions of the German musical theatre, and also musical theatre premieres. From early 1981, the capacity for collecting work titles in Munich will be expanded, and the job of gradually covering the whole of the spoken theatre will be embarked upon. This will be supplemented by the cooperation with Austria already mentioned, and the Austrian national share of productions in the areas of musical and spoken theatre.

Altogether, either in storage or prepared for storage, there now exist about 8,000 production documents. These comprise the current opera programmes of the last three years, the total repertoire of the Residenztheater in Munich 1977/78, the total repertoire of the Nationaltheater Mannheim's three-section theatre, and historic productions of musical and spoken theatre.

• About 5,000 object documents
• About 800 titles of works
• "Playing data" for the artist file

In the first phase of creating the artist file, the data  of theatre workers alive today (about 32,000) will be collected and recorded. In the second phase, existing torsi (Deutsches Theatermuseum with about 30,0000 names including titles of occupations, anniversaries, dates of birth and death; the dpa archives; the Gruner und Jahr archives; Zeutschel biographies, and many more) are to be compiled and completed. The said private archives have already agreed to cooperate.

The work title file is to be continued linearly in the same tenor as the work already begun.  The 20th century authors and their works are being registered at present, proceeding in alphabetical order acccording to the names of the authors.

If two staff members are employed, the production file can be expected to grow at an annual rate of about 7,000 individual documents.

According to the existing work schedule, two keepers of documents and one part-time worker will edit the artistic and biographical data supplied by the artists themselves on the basis of a given pattern, over a period of a good two years. It is in the second phase that the said compilation, completion and expansion of existing torsi will begin.

With one person working on it, the work title file will grow by about 3,500 individual documents per year. During the composition phase, there are three staff members storing data with a time lag of one year. A capacity of about 21,000 objects per year is aimed for in this case.

It need hardly be said that the German section of SIBMAS is extremely interested in international cooperation. The theatre knows no national frontiers. The international exchange of theatre literature, actors, producers, stage and costume designers, composers, conductors, musicians etc. has been standard practice in the European theatre world for centuries. This tradition has expanded and increased in our decades. This automatically creates a need for information which will transcend national borders and national information storage systems. The aim of a new information and documentation system can therefore only be to be useful and compatible in an international context. The use of a supraregional specialised system might enable the babel of system languages, which is already causing chaos in other technical fields, to be reduced to a unified basis of communication. The German section of SIBMAS was pleased to note that Austria, cooperating closely with the centre in Munich, has already started working with TANDEM, A Swiss option for the adoption of TANDEM has been on hand since September of last year. It was noted that the Scandinavian countries displayed an equally remarkable interest.

As a contribution towards promoting the international exchange of information, the German section of SIBMAS offers to make TANDEM available to any countries which may be interested without having to share in the costs of development incurred up to now. TANDEM is a process of development, and this process of development is open to all countries and all colleagues who may wish to participate.
 

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