The Future of Towerbells: Designing a database and interface for global carillon data - Sydney Nguyen

The website Towerbells is a project undertaken by Carl Zimmerman, which collects data about carillons and other bell instruments around the world. It’s used by carillonneurs everywhere to find out technical information about carillons for concerts, the locations of carillons when traveling, and more. However, its database technology is out of date. Furthermore, the World Carillon Federation has a similar list of carillons, but with less information than Towerbells.

In order to pave the way for the future of the Towerbells website and integrate its data with the WCF website, my thesis project aimed to achieve three objectives, with help and advice from Carl Zimmerman and Koen Van Assche, president of the WCF. The objectives were: 1) To migrate information from Towerbells to a modern database, 2) To design an interface for this data for the WCF online carillon list, and 3) To design an administrative page for carillon organizations to manage data about their own carillons.

My thesis text covers this process, the design details of the database, and my use of MariaDB, Django, and other technologies to carry out the project.