Read/Write Digital Libraries for Musicology

Abstract

The Web and other digital technologies have democratised music creation, reception, and analysis, putting music in the hands, ears, and minds of billions of users. Music digital libraries typically focus on an essential subset of this deluge—commercial and academic publications, and historical materials—but neglect to incorporate contributions by scholars, performers, and enthusiasts, such as annotations or performed interpretations of these artifacts, despite their potential utility for many types of users. In this paper we consider means by which digital libraries for musicology may incorporate such contributions into their collections, adhering to principles of FAIR data management and respecting contributor rights as outlined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. We present an overview of centralised and decentralised approaches to this problem, and propose hybrid solutions in which contributions reside in a) user-controlled personal online datastores, b) decentralised file storage, and c) are published and aggregated into digital library collections. We outline the implementation of these ideas using Solid, a Web decentralisation project building on W3C standard technologies to facilitate publication and control over Linked Data. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing prototypes supporting two types of contribution: Web Annotations describing or analysing musical elements in score encodings and music recordings; and, music performances and associated metadata supporting performance analyses across many renditions of a given piece. Finally, we situate these ideas within a wider conception of enriched, decentralised, and interconnected online music repositories.