Standard format for site data pages

Each listed site (carillon, chime, etc.) is described on a single data page that is linked from several different index pages, enabling it to be found by any of several different criteria.  On each such site data page, a standard set of plain text information elements is presented, at least to the extent that such information is available to the compiler of these pages.  The page which you are now reading presents an outline of those information elements, with descriptions, laid out in a style which approximates that used for the actual site data pages.
How you can help:
Boxes like this one appear throughout this page.  They tell more about the kind of information that could appear (but often doesn't) at various points in the site data pages.  If you can supply or correct such information for any site, please do so by using the email link on the bottom line of the page where that information belongs.
Thanks in advance!

The components of the site data page style are as follows:

Ordinary plain text is also used here for explanations about the nature of the information that will be presented on a site data page.

The information elements found on a site data page are as follows:

CITY : COUNTRY

or

CITY : CTRY - st

or

CITY - f : COUNTRY

or

CITY/t : COUNTRY

or

CITY/t - f/n : CTRY - st

is the sitename which uniquely identifies the site being presented on the page.

A 2-letter abbreviation "st" is used to indicate the state (USA) or province (Canada) within the country.  In other countries that have many sites, a 1- or 2-character abbreviation may be used to identify an appropriate major political subdivision.  This abbreviation is usually alphabetic, but in France it is numeric.

The flag "f" is a letter code that is used to distinguish between multiple sites in the same city, and will not be present if a city has only a single site.  The flag is usually one or a few letters based on the initials of the institution name (below).  However, if a single institution owns more than one site, a number "n" is used to distinguish between them.  It is possible for a site flag to have both letters and a number, separated by a slash (e.g., "UM/1").

A 1- or 2-letter tag "t", if present, indicates that the site is within a small town or distinct neighborhood within a very large city.  The tag will usually be the first letter of the town or neighborhood.

Although the last form shown above includes all possible variations, in practice there is no sitename which is quite so complex. 

  Instrument name (or origin)
This line appears if the instrument has a specific name or dedication, or if it originated as a gift (either memorial or simple), but not otherwise.  A long name may occupy more than one line; a combination of name and origin will occupy more than one line.

Origin as a gift appears (parenthesized), and usually appears only when a formal name has not been given.


If no name is shown, do you know that there is one?
or that the instrument was a specific memorial or other gift?
If a name is present, can you provide a more accurate version?

*Location: 

  Institution name
  Location
  City, State/Province, Country
  LL: (latitude and longitude)
This section appears on every site data page, even if the exact location of the site is unknown.  It shows the physical, civil or geographic location of the tower or other installation, and usually identifies the owning institution.  This is not a postal address, although street numbers may be used when cross-street names or similar geographic references are not available or would be less exact.  (The postal address of the institution is shown below under "Contact".)

If a bell tower has a name of its own, that precedes the institution's name.  If the instrument is not hung in a conventional tower, or if the building has more than one tower, a descriptive word or phrase may be shown to indicate the exact location.  If the name of the institution has changed during the lifetime of the instrument, any former name(s) of the institution will be shown in parentheses.  If the building or institution is affiliated with any religious denomination, that affiliation is shown in parentheses after the name of the building or institution.  (In the case of churches, the church name may reflect the denominational category but not the specific denomination, so the common abbreviation for the latter is parenthesized.  In the case of college or university chapels, the denominational affiliation is often a matter of history rather than of present practice, because such chapels nowadays are typically operated in an ecumenical manner and/or are shared by various denominational groups on campus.)  If the present location of the bells is not the same as their original site, then "*Former Location:" will be shown after the (present) "Location", using the same style, and may incorporate a chronological indicator of how long the bells were at that location.

Latitude and longitude, if present, have been determined from online mapping services (Google Maps or equivalent older source), using the best available data.  (This line does not appear on pages which were extracted from the database prior to February 2006.)  They reflect the location of the bells themselves, rather than a GPS-navigation destination.  In case of conflict between map data and aerial photo data, the latter are used.  (Warning: discrepancies of up to several hundred feet have sometimes been observed between overhead photography and map overlays.)  The latitude is shown with N or S (for North or South of the Equator); the longitude is shown with E or W (for East or West of the Greenwich meridian).  Latitude and longitude are both shown in decimal degrees; the number of decimal places reflects our opinion of the accuracy of these figures, as follows:
  • One decimal place = country or state/province (+/- 50 km)
  • Two decimal places = county, city or town (+/- 5 km)
  • Three decimal places = neighborhood (+/- 500 m)
  • Four decimal places = street or intersection (+/- 50 m)
  • Five decimal places = precisely located (+/- 5 m)
Latitude and longitude might have different numbers of decimal places, indicating that the location of the street is known better than the location along the street. 

For sites in England, Scotland or Wales, an OS coordinate pair (Ordnance Survey, Landranger map series) will also appear here.

The number of lines in this section varies depending on the complexity of the location description.  The state/province may appear as a blank between two commas to emphasize that it is unknown.

For pages added or revised after January 2006, this section is normally followed by at least one custom link to an online mapping service, designed to map the location as well as possible.  Following such a link will bring up a map page showing the site's location; in most cases, that location will be marked with an icon centered on the map.  A "Map Use Hints" page tells more about the differences between various map links, explains how the initial appearance of each map was chosen, and describes how you may be able to further customize some maps according to your own desires.  If there is a "Former Location" (see above), there may be two sets of map links - one for the present location and one for that former location. 
For pages added or last revised before February 2006, any map links appear in the middle of the Links section (see below.)

Can you provide a more accurate description of where this set of bells is located?
(Note that our customization of Google Maps presents to you a method for doing exactly that.)
If you have better values for latitude and longitude taken from handheld GPS equipment or a similar source, be sure to describe exactly where you and that equipment were located when you recorded those values.

*Carillonist:
  or
*Player:
  or
*Chimer:
  or
*Ringers' contact(s): 

  Who is appointed to play the instrument
  Postal address
  Telephone number(s)
  E: e-mail.address@domain.name
The heading of this section varies, depending on the number of bells in the instrument and the manner of its operation.  For carillons, the heading is Carillonist, which is equivalent to "carillonneur".  For non-traditional carillons with a keyboard (including hybrid carillons), the heading is Player.  For chimes, the term Chimer is used.  Regardless of the wording of the section header, if the player has a formal title assigned by the institution which owns the instrument, then that title is appended to the person's name. 

For instruments which are primarily used as rings (even when they also contain bells used only for chiming), the term "Ringers' contact(s)" is used for the heading.  This indicates that the person(s) listed here are the designated points of contact for visiting ringers, who should not use the more general "Contact" which is given in the following section. 

More than one person may be listed.  For persons or institutions holding membership in the GCNA as of September 2019, that membership category (Carillonneur, Associate, Associate Carillonneur, Honorary or Sustaining) is shown by one or two letters in parentheses after the person's name: C, A, AC, H, or S.  It is possible for a person to hold both Carillonneur and Honorary membership.

The postal address does not repeat the country name, since it would not be used to send mail within the country.  See the paragraph under "Contact" (below) regarding telephone numbers.

This section does not normally appear for automatic-only instruments, nor for collections.

Can you provide names of other people who regularly play this instrument?
Can you provide more details of how to contact those players who are listed?
Should a person be removed from this section because of death, relocation, or other cause?
Can you provide the span of service (in terms of starting and ending year) for any such person?
This section may be followed by a sub-section which identifies people who preceded the present player in holding an appointment for the instrument.  For carillons, it will usually be titled "*Past carillonists".  Those persons will be listed in chronological order by term of service, beginning with the dedicatory recitalist (when known).  The names of living persons may be accompanied by their current GCNA membership status, while those of deceased persons will preferably be accompanied by their lifespan or year of death.  Titles will normally be shown only when it is known that a person's principal institutional duty was something other than playing the carillon (e.g., Professor of Engineering).

Can you provide a history of the people who formerly played this instrument, or provide additions or corrections to the history which appears here?

*Contact: 

  Who may be contacted about the instrument
  Parcel/postal address(es)
  Telephone number(s)
  E: e-mail@address
The contact is the owner of the instrument, or an official representative of the owner, but not any of the players or ringers (who are separately listed above).  The contact may be a person, an institution, or an office of an institution.  See the paragraphs under "Carillonist/Player/Chimer" (above) regarding GCNA membership categories and postal addresses.  If the postal address is a postbox, then a parcel delivery address may also be shown. (In the USA, at least, parcel delivery services cannot deliver to postboxes.)

Telephone numbers are displayed in various ways, in an attempt to reflect the customs of various countries.  They do not include the international country code; they do include the area code within the country, and it is shown in one of three ways:  (a) by putting parentheses around it (the former North American custom, when area codes were not used when calling inside an area), (b) by preceding the area code with "0" and following it with a space, or (c) by placing "/" between the area code and the local number.  (Since area codes are now required for all calls within the USA, all numbers in this area are now being formatted as ###-###-####.)  Telephone numbers for individuals are designated "H:" for home and "W:" for work when that distinction is known; in all other cases they are marked "T:", except that cell (mobile) phone numbers may be marked "C:".  Facsimile machine (fax) numbers are marked "F:", and may be the same as a voice number when the fax service is on-request only.

Electronic mail addresses are marked "E:", and may be obfuscated to prevent harvesting by automatic Web trawlers.  The manner of obfuscation varies, but should be obvious to the eye of the reader who understands the proper format of eddresses.

This section may be absent or marked "unknown" if no means of contacting the owning institution nor any locally knowledgeable person is known.

Can you provide more accurate or complete contact information?

*Schedule: 

  When the instrument is played for the 
  public.
Times may be shown in either 12-hour or 24-hour formats.
Examples: 9am; 1930-2100.
Automatic play and/or clock-chime operation is explicitly identified when known.
Practice times for rings are included when known.

This section is either omitted or marked "unknown" if nothing is known about the playing or operating schedule.  This section may be omitted if the instrument is inoperable and that fact is reported under Remarks (below).  Alternatively, such inoperability may be reported in this section.

Can you provide a more accurate playing or operating schedule?

*Remarks: 

  Here you may find additional plain-text
  information that does not fit into the
  other categories.
This section is omitted if there are no remarks.  Most often it is used to report historical facts (renovations, names of installers, etc.), as well as technical quirks that don't fit into other fields of the database from which the site data pages are built.  (Example:  identification of bellfoundries which don't have their own index pages, and are indexed under "miscellaneous".)  It is also used to report other bells in the same place that are not part of the instrument (e.g., clock bells, service bells, historical artifacts).

Do you know of any interesting information which doesn't fit into other categories but that might be important to guest artists, other visitors, or historical researchers?

*Technical data: 

  Number of bells, bellfounder(s), year(s) of installation, 
  type of principal playing mechanism, keyboard range, transposition 
  and other items of technical information appear here.
This section is always present, although its information content will vary widely depending on what is known about a particular site.  The contents should be mostly self-explanatory, but we do offer an explanation of the possible complexities of keyboard range.  A few of the items do require some further explanation.

The year of installation may not be the same as the year of casting of the bells (which may be indicated in the Remarks block above), but the database does not contain a field for that fact.  In the case of an instrument containing bells by multiple founders, none of which contributed enough to qualify individually for the initial (or only) phase of the instrument, those bells may have been cast in a several different years, and will usually be described as such in the Remarks block.  Such a multi-founder phase will have only a single line in a Condensed Information Listing within standard or custom hardcopy/PDFs, and only a single entry in the Technical data block of a site data page, but may have multiple entries in foundry indexes and corresponding partial phases in the Links block of that page.

Transposition is not contained in the database.  Instead, it is computed from the relationship between the note of the bourdon bell and the corresponding note on the playing keyboard, both of which are contained in the data base.  Therefore, if transposition is shown as unknown, it is because one or both of those two items is also unknown.

Auxiliary mechanisms are encoded as single capital letters, which may be preceded by "n" to indicate that they are inoperative or no longer present.  A number after a code letter indicates the number of bells operated by that mechanism when it does not operate on the whole instrument.  Possible code letters are as follows:

    B = mechanical (baton) keyboard (almost always with pedalboard)
    C = chimestand (pump-handle keyboard; usually without pedals)
    E = electric or electro-pneumatic automatic
    F = flywheel (Spanish style) full-circle free swinging
    H = hour struck by clock (on a separate bell from any quarter-hour strike)
    I = independent electric keyboard (piano style, no pedals)
    L = Ellacombe stand, or other taut-rope or loose-rope rack
    M = mechanical automatic (drum or a set of cam wheels)
    O = electric operation from organ keyboard
    Q = quarters struck by clock; hour on a quarter bell if no H
    R = rope and wheel (full-circle, for change-ringing)
    S = swung individually by electric motor
    T = tolling hammer with rope
    V = rope and wheel (full-circle, Veronese system)
    W = rope and wheel (swing-chiming only)
    Y = hybrid - baton keyboard with electric action
    * = other (see Remarks for site)

Tower details are self-explanatory when present, except that there are a few special codes for belfry openness, as follows:

    99 = bells are on brackets on a pole or other internal frame
    98 = bells are hung in an open frame without any surrounding walls
Otherwise, belfry openness is calculated relative to the inside of the tower, not the outside.  ("100%" is not used.)
The simplest way to determine the tower height figures is to start from ground level, count steps to the keyboard floor, multiply by the height of the steps (figuring different-height flights of steps separately) and convert the result to meters.  This figure is omitted if there is no keyboard or other manual playing mechanism, but a similar method can be used to estimate the heights of the lowest and highest levels of bells above ground.

NOTE:  Pages generated before June 2012 will not contain information about auxiliary mechanisms nor about tower details.  Find a site that does have such information to see what is wanted for tower details.


This is the only section where individual items of information may be explicitly shown as "unknown".  (Unknown details of keyboard ranges are shown as dashes: "----".)  If you can provide them, please do so!

*Links:

If the owner of the bells has an institutional presence on the Web, then a link to that Website appears here.  Usually that is accompanied by some comments about what pictures and information related to the instrument (or the building housing it) can be found there.

If we know of anyplace else on the World Wide Web which presents a page about this site, or contains a significant mention of this site, or includes at least one picture of this site, then the appropriate link(s) appear here with brief descriptions.

If better pictures than can be found on the Web have been contributed, they will be found either here or on the right side of the page, under the heading Photos (see below).

For pages which were posted before late February 2006, the map links described under Location (above) either appear here or are absent.  (Unfortunately, some of the map links and icons are broken because the mapping service for which they were constructed is defunct, and the links have not yet been replaced.)

If the site identification line at the top of the page included a site flag, then the map may also show icons for nearby sites in the same city.  This is almost always true if a single institution (e.g., a university) has multiple instruments.  (Depending on the size of your computing device, it may be necessary to zoom a map out to see the the additional icons.)  If so, then there will also be direct links from this site data page to those, so that you can find them more easily.

Even if none of the above are known, the section heading will be present, and there will be at least one link back to an index page from which the present page could have been found.  (Usually there are several such back-links, intended to make it easy to compare this instrument with others of similar character.)

If you know the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of any other page on the World Wide Web which provides non-trivial information about this particular instrument, please provide that!  It will save other visitors to this site data page from having to search the Web for it.

If you discover that any link which is present is actually broken, please notify the page maintainer.  Use the mail-link at the bottom of that page, not the one you are reading just now!

*Photos:

This section appears at the right side of the page, opposite Location, on all site data pages which were built from the database after 1 July 2012.  (See Status, below.)  Contributed photographs presented here are in thumbnail form, linked to full-sized versions, in order to minimize page loading time.  Each thumbnail is accompanied by a brief caption.  Photos which require longer captions may be presented via the Links section (see above) or via a separate "photos" page.

If you have good digital photographs of towers, bells, mechanisms, etc., you are welcome to contribute them.  Credits and copyright information can be included or omitted, as you prefer.

*Status: 

  This page was built from the database on dd-Mmm-yy
  based on textual data last updated on yyyy/mm/dd
  and on technical data last updated on yyyy/mm/dd
Three different dates are presented in order to make clear that the currency of the data (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with when the Web page was created or updated.  Revision dates for textual and technical data are tracked separately in the database from which these site data pages are generated.  (In addition, the "Technical data" section will normally end with a statement about the date of the most recent source for that data.  Note that this is not the same as the date when information from that source was entered into the database.)  This three-line section is always present in exactly this format, and the three dates remain unchanged when the Links and/or Photos sections are the only ones to be revised.

Other content:

The page title that appears in the window title bar of your Web browser is the name of the HTML file for the site data page.  This is always 8 characters long, in uppercase, with the first two characters being the standard postal abbreviation for the state (in USA) or province (in Canada) or the ISO standard country code.

Similarly, the page title for site index pages is the name of the HTML file for that page.  However, it may be of any length, and is always mixed case (uppercase "IX" followed by other uppercase letters followed by some lowercase letters).

Page titles for other pages are unrelated to the names of their respective files, and are generally mixed case.  For example, the title of the page which you are now reading is "Standard format" rather than "Std_format" (the filename).

Navigation:

Every page in this Website has at the bottom two or three lines similar to those found on the page you are now reading.  (For site date pages, the date line is omitted in favor of the Status section described above.)  The first of those lines provides links to the TowerBells Home page, to the site data top page, and to two other important pages.  The last of those lines provides a page-specific mail-link for submitting feedback on, or sending an inquiry about, the content of that page.

Every site data page contains, as the last part of the "Links" section (see above), at least one line which points back to the place in an index page where a forward link to that site data page could have been found.

Indexes and summaries also contain, just above the standard navigation block, a back-link to the page which lists other indexes or other summaries for the same geographical area of the world.


To request clarification of any of the explanations presented above, please use the email link on the bottom line of this page.
If you can provide better information for any specific site, or corrections for any index or summary or general page, please do so by using the email link on the bottom line of the page where that information belongs.
Thanks in advance!

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This page was created 1996/12/12 and last revised 2024/10/17.

Please send comments or questions about this page to csz_stl@swbell.net.