Periods of transition—back to school, liturgical season changes, the first weeks with a new pastor or music minister—can be demanding, to the point where one can get way behind in the daily/weekly/monthly chores. Filing music is a chore: not exciting, but crucial if you’re going to be able to find anything. Reporting reprint license usage is a regular chore—and a legal requirement. If your community prints a regular worship aid or puts the day’s hymnal numbers in the bulletin, you have the chore of providing the music, hymnal numbers and pertinent information by the deadline.

Training volunteers to help with these tasks is a good idea, but even routine chores require some aptitude. It’s still your responsibility. Reporting license usage, for instance, means knowing where the music came from and how often it was used. In the case of more obscure selections, you may be the one who has to go into Advanced Search, or figure out which of three seemingly identical listings is the correct one to report.

It’s the same thing with filing music: Do you file “Lord of the Dance” under L? Or under I, for the first line—“I danced in the morning”? Or even under T, for The Lord of the Dance? Where multiple choices are possible,
pick one, and make a note of it on the music itself (file under L) and on the file folder or box. That alone can save a lot of hassle when you or your volunteers are trying to find something at the last minute.

And it’s a lot easier to do chores regularly than to wait until a giant backlog looms.