We are pleased to announce significant upgrades to this Web site. With our growth over the last few years—thanks to you, our loyal and enthusiastic visitors—has come the need to deliver faster, more exacting searches. In response, we’ve converted to a MySQL database for increased performance, reliability, and ease of use. This new system will allow us to continue adding content in the form of news, cue sheets, photographs, and poster art, without slowing down access. Since our launch in November 2004, the number of monthly visitors to Dimitri Tiomkin: the Official Web Site has increased more than 400 percent. Our visitors reside not only throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe but also from all corners of the globe, including China, Japan, Brazil, and the Czech Republic.

The revised layout and design, by Gabriel Nordyke, president of Insights Design Studio (www.insightsdesign.com), is intended to get you to the data faster and more accurately. “Our goals with the functional redesign have been to improve the visual display of data returned by searching, as well as improved search performance and response time,” he explains. “There are so many different kinds of information contained on so many different levels that it was difficult to display it all with a single type of result.”

Nordyke and programmer David Panzarella developed a simplified approach that allows for filtered searching. “The new categorized search results illustrate just how many types of rich media are contained within this growing database,” says Nordyke. For example, entering “Hairston” in Archive Search will provide a link to three articles with information on the choral arranger Jester Hairston, along with links to photographs and cue sheet information.

“The new production display and navigation facilitates ease of use and interconnectivity of information from one record to the next,” adds Nordyke, “while clearly connecting the records with an associated production.” In the production details, reference numbers now connect each composer or lyricist associated with the music for a particular film to their contribution as listed on the cue sheet.

As we continue to add data and functionality to the site, we hope you will visit often to peruse the database and to check out the latest in news and features. Upcoming articles will examine Tiomkin’s career as a concert pianist and his score for The Westerner. Also, keep an eye out for lobby cards, coming soon.

A special note of thanks to Olivia Tiomkin Douglas for her continued support.