The past several weeks have been key ones in advancing the digitization project. Slowly, what has been primarily conceptual is taking shape. Some general description of the project developments and some specific initiatives follow.
First, the challenge all along has been how to identify and exploit a platform that can accommodate the audio recordings and accompanying artwork and liner notes in a way that is most accessible and inviting to potential users, especially St. Edwards students and researchers. Over the past four months, I have sought to master the technical aspects of Innovative Interfaces (Millennium) Content Pro (CP), a beta catalog system with which St. Edwards is a participating partner (along with other library systems such as Michigan State University, University of Western Ontario, University of San Diego, Binghamton Public Library, Westerville Public Library, and others). This project entails a periodic conference call with the technical supervisor of the fielding, Rice Majors. Once fully operational, it will integrate with the Scarborough-Phillips' library's companion catalog system Encore, which is replacing their previous system, OPAC.
One week ago, in Seattle during the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference, I met with Rice, who was hosting an Innovative Interfaces booth. We discussed some of the hurdles I have encountered, such as how to colocate the three data elements noted above. Additionally, we discussed whether the Content Pro system will be compatible with Tom Lord's Discography (TJD), an online very thorough database that provides metadata in the form of discographical detail that I wish to use as a data source to feed into the Content Pro site for the Jazz in the Stacks portion of the catalog. This option required me to research pricing options (estimated at $500 per year), compatibility, data reliability, and other aspects of suitability for adoption. As of Thursday 19 March, my approach is that I have submitted to library contracting (Kate Silton) the necessary information to allow an account with TJD to be established. ON Thursday, I called and discussed the technical aspects of how these two platforms will interact, and essentially, Mr. Lord indicated that his proposal is to provide a link through the CP site that will launch users into the database. Thus, a user would expect to leave the CP site, licensed to provide access within CP, and navigate the user to the TJD database, where the relevant entry can be input.
For now, we will pursue this option, although it still requires ensuring that CP can handle the leap outside its environment into the TJD one as part of the research process. Additionally, of course, there are the technical hurdles of capturing the album cover artwork, the liner notes, ensuring making access to them does not violate copyright restrictions, and ensuring access is searchable and visually attractive. In short, these efforts depict examples of the technical solutions I am pursuing to make the actual finding aids and catalog entries available, so that prospective users can identify and locate the music and associated intellectual content they seek.
Meanwhile, this past week Megan Winget's article on liner notes was net published on the ARSC listserv. The article is available at this link. The hosting site is the International Conference on Digital Libraries.
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Another relatively recent undertaking has been participation in ongoing work with Variations, a National Science Foundation-funded open source software initiative that Indiana University has provided leadership in exploring for the last fifteen years. Its objective is to "provide online access to streaming audio and scanned score images in support of teaching, learning, and research," and which is designed to "enable institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights."(1) These objectives are perfectly complementary with the project here at St. Edwards, and provide an alternative solution to mounting the digital material in the event the selected course of action founders.
On March 4th, Variation hosted an online Webinar that lasted approximately an hour. The Variations team provided prospective project participants with modeling samples of how the environment currently looks and feels; answered members' questions about the expectations going forward; and accepted recommendations for other features that will meet the targeted participants' needs. Additionally, when summarizing the Webinar results with the S-P Library director Tom Leonhardt, he noted that Stanford's experience with the Archive of Recorded Sound, and that institution's development of an acceptable format and standard to provide user access to their sound archives. According to its website, "the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is supplying audio examples for these pages in the au format, also called the uLaw, NeXT, or Sun Audio format. Our samples are provided as 8-bit, 22kHz monaural sound files, the largest being just over one megabyte in size."(2)
Notes
1. Dunn, Jon. "[DIGLIB] Announcement: Indiana University offers open source digital music library software." February 20, 2009.
2. Stanford University. "Sound Bytes: The AU Format for Sound." Online. Accessed: March 20, 2009. Available at: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/ars/collections/sound.html#samples
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Lastly, I continue to prepare for the April public outreach events. While my next blog entry will lay out the proposed itinerary, for now I am attaching the trial flyer design announcing the events during the week 12-18 April. The flyer was designed by Angela McNerney, my daughter, who is a graphic designer and marketing advertiser for Dell in Round Rock, Texas.
