Digital music libraries - Research and development

A report on the progress of several major research and development projects in digital music libraries is presented. Digital music libraries provide enhanced access and functionality that facilitates scholarly research and education. The issue of integrating digital music library collections with interactive instructional applications is addressed

Local music collecting and collections in Canadian libraries

Social Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilLocal music holds tangible meaning in the form of evidence of historical events, development of musical practices, documentation technologies, cultural artefacts, It also holds intangible meaning in the form of associations with memory, nostalgia, and feeling. Studying collections of local music and collecting practices (as opposed to individual artifacts, musical genres, or music scenes) provides us with unique understandings of the interplay between local, regional, and national music histories. This paper will discuss the findings of a survey of local music collecting and collections in Canada, which will be conducted in early 2018. We will provide an analysis of the collected data, which investigates behaviours, preferences, and beliefs about local music collections and collecting in libraries. Specifically, the themes of investigation include collection management, collection development, access, digital tools, promotion, challenges, and future planning related to local music collections. This research seeks to understand the state of local music collections and collecting in libraries across Canada. Specifically to: 1) to identify where collections of local music are held, what music(s) they document, and what evidentiary value they possess; 2) to understand the perceived value of collecting local music, and 3) to record local music collection management practices currently in use and where these practices may be improved

Annual Report 2008-2009

Contents: Focus on the User......p. 1 From the Dean of Libraries......p. 2 University Libraries......p. 3 Thomas Cooper Library......p. 4 South Caroliniana Library......p. 6 Rare Books and Special Collections......p. 11 South Carolina Political Collections......p. 14 Digital Collections......p. 15 Moving Image Research Collections......p. 17 Music Library......p. 18 Elliott White Springs Business Library......p. 19 Library Annex and Arthur E. Holman Jr. Conservation Laboratory......p. 19 University Libraries Office of Development......p. 2

Collecting Local Music in Canadian Libraries: A National Survey

Local music artifacts are often unpublished or independently produced, making them difficult to collect. Local music collectors in libraries may encounter barriers in obtaining and preserving them. This has resulted in a wide variety of methods for collecting local music (often undocumented), and various strategies for notifying the public that such collections exist. This research explores the connection between music and place as it relates to the practices of local music collectors and collecting in Canadian cultural heritage institutions. Specifically, it explores the following research questions: 1. Where are collections of local music held, what music(s) do they document, and what historical value do they possess? 2. What is the perceived value of collecting local music for collectors? 3. What are the local music collection management practices currently in use and can these practices be improved? As part of a larger study on local music collecting—Sounds of Home: Exploring Local Music Collections and Collecting in Canada—we distributed an online questionnaire to local music collectors in public, academic, and special libraries. This paper presents a summary and analysis of the survey findings, which reveal insights into practices, beliefs, and strategies surrounding local music collecting in Canadian libraries. The results give a detailed picture of how local music collectors choose to approach aspects of collection management, collection development, access, digital innovations, challenges, and planning when working with local music collections. This data also contributes to building a more complete picture of where local music collections are located and distributed in Canada

Sounds of Home: A Survey of Local Music Collection Management Practices in Canadian Libraries

SSHRCPeer ReviewedThis paper describes the findings of a national survey of local music collection managers in Canadian libraries in 2018. The survey aims to capture a snapshot of local music collection management practices by identifying areas where collection managers make use of specialized skills and competencies and where practices may be improved. An online questionnaire was sent to local music collection managers in Canadian libraries and consisted of 20 questions that addressed demographics, collection scope, collection development, promotion, access, and preservation. The results show that local music collections are diverse in scope and include a wide range of formats. Many include archival materials or are described or organized using archival principles. Collection managers use a range of strategies to build and develop local music collections, including working with community members and donors to identify, select, and purchase collection materials. Collections are used most frequently by community members and researchers to conduct scholarly or historical research. Outreach and promotion are areas where collection managers are using diverse strategies, including community engagement, event hosting, and online marketing, to build awareness of collections. Physical and digital preservation practices are being implemented by most participants, and online access to collections is often available through additional collection description or digitization. Collection managers may face challenges due to the unique nature of local music collections. Strategies for collection management, collection development, outreach, or promotion may fall outside traditional professional skill sets or competencies. Areas for development include donor relations, community engagement, and archival collection management

Digitization of Bulgarian folk songs with music, notes and text

A digitization project for Bulgarian folk songs Information technologies for presentation of Bulgarian folk songs with music, notes and text in a digital library has been started last year, joining the efforts of various experts from three institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia University and New Bulgarian University. The research that is carried out under this project aims at the development of a technology and corresponding supporting software tools for the creation and usage of heterogeneous institutional digital libraries. The tools will satisfy the needs of the researchers for information technologies in the fields of ethnology, ethnomusicology and folkloristic. In the project frame a technological environment for digitization of notations is created, specially adapted for Bulgarian folk songs. Now a database with notes, lyrics and music is under development. An initial digitization and preservation of the Bulgarian cultural heritage will be carried out by means of digitization and insertion into the system of over 1000 songs that were recorded and written down during the 60s and 70s of XX century

Assessing music ontologies for the development of a complex database

UID/EAT/00472/2019The increasing volume and diversity of musical information has been creating a challenge for the uniform creation, reuse and sharing of this kind of information. As part of addressing this challenge there has been a growing interest in musical ontologies, as a technique to support the sharing of heterogeneous musical information, both for commercial and cultural dissemination purposes. Motivated by a specific objective, in the context of the development of an information system on musicians and respective artistic production and professional career, existing ontologies for the music domain, in general, were surveyed. The purpose of this study is to support the hypothesis that this approach can not only support the specific requirement of that objective, but also facilitate the interoperability with other existing systems, with databases and catalogs built with multiple technical solutions. So far, three ontologies that were found closer to the study object of the project were analyzed, reflecting three different models: (1) The Musical Ontology framework, developed by the Center for Digital Music of Queen Mary University, London, under the direction of Prof Mark Sandler, within the scope of the projects OMRAS - Online music recognition and searching (NSF / JISC Digital Libraries Initiative, 1999-2002) and OMRAS2 - A Distributed Research Environment for Music Informatics and Computational Musicology (EPSRC grant EP / E017614 / 1, 2007-2010), and that uses the FRBR model as a reference; (2) the DOREMUS ontology, which resulted from the DOREMUS project, funded in 2014 by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France and that brought together three major cultural institutions: the National Library of France, the Philharmonie de Paris and Radio France, and that is based on the FRBRoo model; and (3) the Performed Music Ontology, an extension of the BIBFRAME ontology, first released in April 2017, as a result of a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for Linked Data for Production (LD4P), led by the Stanford University Libraries, in collaboration with five other libraries: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and the Library of Congress. This paper presents the purpose of the motivating project for the research, aggregation and consolidation of information on musicians and respective artistic production and professional career, and the assessment of these three significant music ontologies as relevant sources of inspiration for the design of the knowledge base for that project.publishersversionpublishe

Digital libraries for creative communities

Digital library technologies have a great deal to offer to creative, design communities. They can enable large collections of text, images, music, video and other information objects to be organised and accessed in interesting and diverse ways. Ordinary people—people not traditionally viewed as 'creators' or 'designers'—can now conceive, assemble, build, and disseminate new information collections. This paper explores the development rationale behind the Greenstone digital library technology. We also examine three examples of creative new techniques for accessing and presenting information in digital libraries and stress the importance of tailoring information access to support the requirements of the users and application area

A study of the information needs of the users of a folk music library and the implications for the design of a digital library system

A qualitative study of user information needs is reported, based on a purposive sample of users and potential users of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a small specialist folk music library in North London. The study set out to establish what the user’s (both existing and potential) information needs are, so that the library’s online service may take them into account with its design. The information needs framework proposed by Nicholas (2000) is used as an analytical tool to achieve this end. The demographics of the users were examined in order to establish four user groups: Performer, Academic, Professional and Enthusiast. Important information needs were found to be based on social interaction, and key resources of the library were its staff, the concentration of the collection and the library’s social nature. A collection of broad design requirements are proposed based on the analysis and this study also provided some insights into the issue of musical relevance, which are discussed

Characterizing the Landscape of Musical Data on the Web: State of the Art and Challenges

Musical data can be analysed, combined, transformed and exploited for diverse purposes. However, despite the proliferation of digital libraries and repositories for music, infrastructures and tools, such uses of musical data remain scarce. As an initial step to help fill this gap, we present a survey of the landscape of musical data on the Web, available as a Linked Open Dataset: the musoW dataset of catalogued musical resources. We present the dataset and the methodology and criteria for its creation and assessment. We map the identified dimensions and parameters to existing Linked Data vocabularies, present insights gained from SPARQL queries, and identify significant relations between resource features. We present a thematic analysis of the original research questions associated with surveyed resources and identify the extent to which the collected resources are Linked Data-ready