OIT Teams Refactor MusicDetour Website

DFW Music Archive

Recently, multiple OIT Teams came together to assist Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Dr. David Arditi on his MusicDetour website – an online archive of Dallas-Fort Worth’s local music.

Originally developed by past Graduate Research Assistants, the MusicDetour website displayed functional and potential security issues. Working initially with Web Hosting Services and Enterprise Data Services to determine a best fit for hosting and to obtain legacy data extracts, the OIT Digital Product Innovation and Development Team took the lead in providing a refactor of the online application.

Realizing the value in working with OIT, Dr. Arditi shared this, “When OIT came to me to tell me MusicDetour had been compromised and needed to be removed, I was crushed. When Douglas suggested your office was starting a pilot program to build websites for faculty, I felt optimistic.

“The end product thoroughly impressed me. Pavel did an impressive rebuild of the website by reverse engineering the old site. Originally, we talked about building it to maintain historical integrity; but now the site is so stunning, it has me inspired to begin work on it again.”

MusicDetour is a digital depository for music created and performed in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. It preserves all genres performed in the Metroplex and serves as a free public resource. Local musicians create music that often is not recorded, or the recordings are not stored. By archiving this music, MusicDetour serves as a permanent record of local music upon which new culture can be produced.

Dr. Arditi is a new client of OIT’s Digital Product Innovation and Development’s services and an ongoing client of Web Hosting Services’ cloud hosting.

Drew Eubank • 2022-May-09