Greenstone as a music digital library toolkit

Greenstone is an open source digital library system that has developed and matured since its inception in 1995. Today it is used in over 60 countries, with a strong emphasis on humanitarian aid. The software is also used as a framework for research in other fields such has human computer interaction, text-mining, and ethnography. This article provides a summary of Greenstone's uses to date with music documents. First we discuss incorporating musical formats into the Greenstone system; then we describe provision for searching and browsing in a music collection

Visual collaging of music in a digital library

This article explores the role visual browsing can play within a digital music library. The context to the work is provided through a review of related techniques drawn from the fields of digital libraries and human computer interaction. Implemented within the open source digital library toolkit Greenstone, a prototype system is described that combines images located through textual metadata with a visualisation technique known as collaging to provide a leisurely, undirected interaction with a music collection. Emphasis in the article is given to the augmentations of the basic technique to work in the musical domain

Digital libraries on an iPod: Beyond the client-server model

This paper describes an experimental system that enhanced an iPod with digital library capabilities. Using the open source digital library software Greenstone as a base, this paper more specifically maps out the technical steps necessary to achieve this, along with an account of our subsequent experimentation. This included command-line usage of Greenstone's basic runtime system on the device, augmenting the iPod’s main interactive menu-driven application to include searching and hierarchical browsing of digital library collections stored locally, and a selection of "launcher" applications for target documents such as text files, images and audio. Media rich applications for digital stories and collaging were also developed. We also configured the iPod to run as a web server to provide digital library content to others over a network, effectively turning the traditional mobile client-server upsidedown

Digital Music Libraries: Librarian Perspectives and the Challenges Ahead

This paper reports the results of a survey targeting current members of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (CAML) that investigated the extent to which the current designs and structures of digital music libraries meet the needs of librarians in collecting, preserving, organizing, and disseminating diverse types of music documents. The challenges and barriers experienced in hosting digital collections are discussed. The gap between the current and ideal functionalities, as well as the future possibilities, are explored.

Effective library promotion: empowering patrons to discover and create

The message chosen to promote the library will inevitably influence the tools selected for marketing and outreach. The tools presented here were chosen to represent a broad spectrum of library types, and would be easily adaptable to a more focused mission. This overall approach would be most useful to public, school, and academic libraries rather than special libraries and archives. The central message of this outreach strategy is that a library is a place for discovery and creation -- a place where creative and intellectual works can be produced, shared, and consumed. As a community center with two-way outreach, the library itself can become something that is being created and discovered

Narratives and exploration in a musicology app: Supporting scholarly argument with the Lohengrin TimeMachine

We present the Lohengrin TimeMachine web application, consisting of video and textual musicological essays supported by an interactive digital companion. The digital companion allows a user to browse and compare all the occurrences of a motive in the opera Lohengrin, viewing them by text, vocal score and orchestration, with detailed views, segment labelling, audio excerpts and textual commentaries supporting the exploration. The video and essay modes show live links into the companion as the viewer or reader progresses through the narrative. This application is built on Linked Data technology and demonstrates the viability of such an approach, with the knowledge graph being traversed in the user’s browser to gather the materials for display. It uses the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework, which provides the basis for a range of music-related Linked Data applications. In this paper, we describe and illustrate the application in use, its technological underpinnings, as well as the motivation and implementation experience

And we did it our way: A case for crowdsourcing in a digital library for musicology

This article makes the case for a digital library based on a crowdsourcing approach for musicology. At its heart, the argument draws upon ideas present in the popular music video TV show Pop-Up Video, a format devised in the late 1990s that embellishes the shown content with info nuggets that popup as bubbles and then disappear, as the video plays. We updated and extended the concept to operate in a web environment, choosing a digital library framework as a way to organize the set of videos contained in the site, and casting the popup information collated and displayed as metadata---aspects that further progress the argument for the developed software architecture being fit-for-purpose as a tool for musicologists. The article presents a walkthrough of the developed site, and then goes on to show how the elements present---particularly the gamification elements that focus on symbolic note content entered through a range of virtual musical instruments: piano, drum-kit and guitar---can be re-purposed for use by musicology scholars

WKU Libraries: Using PastPerfect to Open Hidden Collections

Traditionally, access records for the Department of Special Collections were produced in analog forms which limited their use to in-house researchers. The author chronicles the library/museum decision to purchase, PastPerfect, collection management software and reviews the product from a librarian’s point of vie

A location-based audio book reader

The ability to display text on mobile devices has been progressively improved during the last decade with the growth in use of mobile devices. Recently, the e-book reader has been incorporated into travel tourism. In this project we design, implement and evaluate a location-based mobile e-book reader that provides users with both text and audio information. This project has two goals. The first goal is to build a rich location-based travel information provider system as a standalone mobile application without using web browsing functions. The second goal is to provide a communication between the mobile application and a digital library of e-book collections. Experimental results show that the mobile application, during elected events, has provided a special e-book reading experience to participants. The majority of participants liked the system especially with regards to interface design and functionality. Over half the participants felt the location-based audio e-book reader system was usable and interesting while traveling