Collaborative Musicology: Designing a Digital Library of Musical Events Ephemera
David Bainbridge, Rachel Cowgill, Frankie Perry, John Stephen Downie, Alan John Dix, Michael Bernard Twidale · 2023
We explore the challenges and potential for collaborative musicological research in creating a Digital Library centred on musical ephemera relating to historical performances. Runs of concert programmes and season brochures, constituting a metadata-rich collection of highly formulaic homogeneous documents, are combined with related but extremely heterogeneous groups of documents (such as a contemporary musical dictionary, music society journal, composer directory, congress schedules) as well as scores, audio, and other archival materials located on external websites. We give an overview of the prototype, explain how we fused general-purpose open-source software toolkits and libraries to develop an image-based Digital Library with editable annotations and backing store enhanced with linked data, and conclude by observing how well engaging with these code-bases worked out in practice.