Collection Principles
The abstract of the IN Harmony IMLS grant (found on the website under Project Information) explains that the pieces in the digital collection were selected for digitization based on composer, subject, arranger and publisher. Collection librarians and specialists were then consulted to select additional items based on genre or theme. The collection was created based on the goals of:
- fostering collaborative digital library development by partnering with institutions with complementary collections.
- digitizing a portion of these institutions' collections and making them available to the public free of charge on the web.
- bringing the materials and their metadata together on a single website, to offer federated searching and searching of individual collections.
- testing the hypothesis that approximately 90 percent of copyrights for materials published between 1923 and 1964 have not been renewed.
Object Characteristics
The object scans differ based on their copyright status. Copyrighted items show only a small image of the sheet music’s first page. Underneath is the message "Under copyright protection. Images not available on this site." The user must contact the holding institution to view this material. All other materials have the option of either viewing the sheet music pages online or downloading a PDF. Online, the viewer is allowed to zoom in once. In the downloaded PDF the viewer can zoom in many times, however quality begins to suffer. The PDF is also printable, an important feature for musicians who will probably want to print the sheet music.
Under Project Information there is an entire page on the digitization process, methods of quality control, web derivatives and PDF creation. Here is just a sample: "All images are created at 400 dpi. All covers as well as all pages with color are scanned at 24-bit color with imbedded Adobe1998RGB color profiles. All other score pages are digitized at 8-bit grayscale with the imbedded profile of Gray Gamma 2.2. The inclusion of the profiles helps ensure that the image will reproduce as accurately as possible.”
Metadata
The collection can be searched by composer’s name, song title, year, instrumentation, genre or subject. The homepage also features thumbnails of featured sheet music for browsing. The featured sheet music seems to have been selected based on illustrations. A few interesting pieces of metadata, included with each item and unique to sheet music, are the instrumentation the first line of the song and the first line of the chorus. These seem like they would be extremely helpful search tools for those of us with poor music memories.
The metadata for each physical object is available alongside the digital image, however the metadata of the digital object is not supplied. In the Project Information section there is also a page devoted to how the project's metadata was created. User studies were employed and a custom cataloging tool was developed that would meet the needs of the diverse institutions supplying the collection (some focus more on the musical content, some on the arrangement and organization of a collection by its compiler, and some on the cover art). The metadata is mapped to Dublin Core and will soon be made available for OAI harvesting.
One major critique I have is that rights metadata is not given for any of the sheet music. Even for the copyrighted material, which cannot be viewed online, no further information is given aside from a link to the holding institution's website. The name of the holding institution is given in the metadata, along with an "IN Harmony ID" number, but it's unclear if this would be enough information for the institution to quickly find the item. This would again be especially crucial for the copyrighted materials, which cannot be viewed online.
Intended Audience
The project seems like it would largely appeal to music historians and scholars or nostalgic adults. There are no educational activities or lesson plans to help bring teachers or students to the site. Getting these regional collections on the web will expand the audience of each institution by making the sheet music more readily available to the nation and the world and bringing in people already using their sister collections.
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