The database describes several types of main objects: songs and books. They are associated with other objects: collectors, interpreters and places of collection.

The song is characterized by its reference: This is a number with no other meaning or function than that of the ranking guide, and address. If, as may happen, different variants of the song have different titles of origin, this will be the same for all these variants.
Systematically, this number begins with "M" as "Malrieu" (e.g. M-00141).

A ersion corresponds to a song collected by a collector from an interpreter in a given place. Each version is identified by a number arbitrarily chosen in alphabetical order of author and book. The purpose of this number is to reference a version and has no intrinsic meaning.
The same version could be the subject of several editions, so these are multiple occurrences of the same version. In this case, a letter is added to the version number, in chronological order: "A" for the earliest occurrence, then "B", "C", etc. This letter therefore has a chronological meaning related to its publication date.

A book (book, magazine, manuscript, broadside...) can contain several different songs.


In addition, for any textual search:

• The search is done by character string in the strict sense (replies to "Brezel 1914" are not those of "1914 Brezel").
• It is possible to use a truncation (*) to replace a letter, word, or group of words.
• It is not possible to search with Boolean operators of the type AND, OR, EXCEPT.