Meghan C. Blog 2: Chopin Early Editions Collection

Frederic Chopin was born in Poland in the early 1800's and soon became to be recognized as one the greatest Polish composers. His compositions were mainly for pianos and solos and are essential to the romantic/classical movement. The University of Chicago has some 400 first and early editions of Chopin's musical compositions within their Chopin Early Editions Digital Collection. These pieces are integral to the scholars who were researching Chopin, music, or even the history of that period relating to the creation of the different editions of his music and how popular he became in other countries. These editions have been cared for by the Special Collections Research Center and have been digitized in response to the documents age and integrity.

Collection Principles
The collection was made available for researchers wishing to understand Chopin and the time frame in which his music became popular. This collection also makes available the original documents for students and other scholarly members of the music community so they can be used as sheet music. The collection is intended for limited scholarly purpose, not for the study of the documents themselves, but rather just the image representations of them. The purpose of the digitization was to protect the fragile pieces from deterioration from overuse. Although, this does not mean that they are unavailable. Authorized members are still permitted to handle them.

Object Characteristics
The images themselves were scanned and made available as a set of high and low JPEG images. The original files were saved as TIFF and CD as well as tape backup's are available of the images. The site was created with the intention of usability and ease of access for those wishing to print or just view the documents. Each file is searchable by title, dedicatee, genre, and uniform title. Once clicking a title you are taken to the bibliographic information and from there an option is given for the image itself. After that a higher quality image can be chosen and zoomed in on once to its maximum. The images are color and are very attractive and they contain measurements of the the original documents. The images almost make up for the lack of aestheticism provided by the site. For a collection as small as this, you really can't ask for too much.

Metadata The website was very informative about what kind of metadata collection is was using. They said both METS and MODS were used for their sources and made into MARC format for the use of online databases. The data is accessible from World Cat, and OAI. So the metadata is very comprehensive.

Intended Audience
The audience is probably going to be researchers of Chopin and students of music, as well as musicians who wish to view and play early editions of Chopin's works. The site is easy to navigate and very simple. It details exactly what the intent was and the scope of what they wished to accomplish. I am sure that people all over the world who are interested in music and chopin are able to find this collection easily.