Collection Management with Google Forms

Music educators have to be top-notch organizers - when we are managing groups, trips, and materials for 30, 50, or 70+ students in one class period, we have to be on top of our game.

Enter Google Forms!

Our school has a collection of 800+ different pieces of music (and that's the pared down collection). We've never had a systematic way to keep them organized and catalogued, and the products available for music departments aren't really the product we're looking for at the K-8 level. (For example, we don't need to keep track of fees ourselves, we don't need to track uniform pieces, we don't have to worry about elaborate trips abroad, etc...) We really just need it for cataloging information, so Google Forms is the perfect solution for that.

I created a Form to collect all of the information for each piece including...

• Title
• Composer/Arranger
• Voicing
• Number of Copies
• School Collection
• Accompaniment

Let me explain the "School Collection" entry: we have 5 schools in our district, four K-5 buildings and one 6-8 building. But there is a lot of crossover with unison, 2-part, and easy 3-part music. So to share our titles withe other music teachers in our district, we all use the same Form. That way we can avoid ordering music that colleagues may already have in their schools' collections.

One thing to keep in mind with the new Forms: The responses tab doesn't always keep things in the same order they were entered. To best search and organize, click on "Create a Spreadsheet" to see the information for each title in your collection.

If you need to make the results available to multiple people in your district, you can "Add Collaborators" on the Form and invite from there (click on the three dot menu in the top right corner). This will allow them to view the Responses sheet, not just to view and submit information on the Form.

Want to make things really easy? Enlist the help of music students looking for service hours for graduation credit, Tri-M, or Honors Society and send the Form for them to use while cataloging your music!

Take a look at this copy of the Form, and feel free to copy and then edit for your own use:

District Choral Music Library Form
** This is NOT connected to my school music library collection, it is a copy of the Form. I encourage you to enter in test information so you can go through the form yourself to see how it works! **