Music Australia

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Music Australia, a national federated online discovery service, was launched on 14th March 2005 at the National Library of Australia by Senator, the Honourable Rod Kemp, Minister for the Arts and Sports. The service is hosted by the National Library of Australia in conjunction with over 50 cultural organisations across Australia.

Contents

[edit] Scope

The free service for Australian music resources covers all types, styles and genres of Australian music, and showcases Australia’s musical culture across contemporary and historical periods, from the 19th century to the latest hit. It contains music scores, sound recordings, websites, pictures, films, multimedia, kits, objects, archival collections and other music-related material held in libraries, archives, museums, universities, and specialist music and research organisations in Australia.

The service contains information about Australian music, including books and theses, information created by Australians about non-Australian music, and biographical entries for Australian musicians, performers, composers, groups and ensembles, festivals and organisations.

Music Australia's definition of 'Australian music' is broad and inclusive, and covers music published in Australia or music composed or performed by Australians or about Australia or Australians.

Music Australia functions as a top-layer, federated discovery service to metadata with digital content created, archived and delivered by the contributing organisation. It uses two linked databases, one for Resources and one for People and organisation information. A search will find music and music-related resources physically scattered across Australia, where vast geographical distances, remote locations, dispersed collections and low level of community funding mitigates against easy access to music resources. Music Australia creates and displays a ‘virtual’ Australian national music collection, where the metadata is aggregated centrally by the National Library but returns the user to the home institution to access the resource.

[edit] Features

Music Australia has a simple search interface, with an advanced search option that allows limits to be applied for a refined results set. A successful search will return a result set from the two linked Music Australia resource and people databases.

The Music Australia service includes themes highlighting a topic by providing a relevant selection of music materials available in the service. A theme can be used as an entry point for resources on a topic in the musical landscape. eg. the Music Australia National treasures theme supports the National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries online exhibition

[edit] Permalinks

Music Australia uses various permalinks to ensure permanent links and access to it's resources. These permalinks can be used from any browser and do not require the Music Australia website to be open.

[edit] Search

A search permalink can be constructed using the base search www.musicaustralia.org/search/ and adding a term or topic name, eg. the search http://www.musicaustralia.org/search/kangaroos returns a wonderful mixture of music material associated with ‘kangaroos’, including sheet music from Paris in the 1800’s, through dances to football anthems. The search http://www.musicaustralia/search/Waltzing+matilda from any browser, returns all the music resources in Music Australia on 'Waltzing Matilda'


[edit] Themes

To see the music resources for a Music Australia theme use the theme permalink base search www.musicaustralia/theme/ and add the name of the theme. The theme name is case sensitive so must be added as it appears in the service, eg. the search http://www.musicaustralia/theme/Waltzing+Matilda will return the records for the theme 'Waltzing Matilda' in Music Australia. For themes that have subthemes use the name of the subtheme, eg. the theme 'Australian places' has subthemes for each state and territory and the search http://www.musicaustralia.org/theme/Australian+Capital+Territory returns the selected music resources from the ACT and Canberra subtheme.

[edit] Persistent identifiers

A persistent identifier to a resource will provide ongoing access and reference to that resource and can be used whenever a permanent link is required. Persistent identifiers / Cite this page links are provided in Music Australia and are displayed in the full information view of every Music Australia resource and people and organisation record, eg. http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ma-an12285853 is the persistent identifier / citation to the record for the Yothu Yindi website, both the current version and the in archived versions in Pandora, Australia's web archive.

Persistent identifiers are a permanent reference/citation for a resource in a changing digital world. The National Library of Australia implemented its own managed naming scheme of persistent identifiers for digital resources after assessing that there was no schema currently in use or under development internationally in 2001, that was sufficiently mature to offer a suitable solution in the short-term for its digital collections.

[edit] History of development

Developing and delivering the systems to make this service possible posed enormous challenges to music librarians and information professionals across Australia. When the first ideas for a service were floated in 2001, Australia’s music was scattered across many different institutions, libraries, archives, museums and arts and specialists music organisations, and there was no way for users or researchers to find and access them. There were no collections of digitised printed music and although some national institutions had been digitally preserving their sound collections, none were available online.

[edit] Timeline

  • Pilot demonstrator project: November 2001-August 2002
  • Pilot to Production development: March 2003-February 2005
  • Release of Music Australia 1.0: March 2005
  • Release of Music Australia 2.0: April 2007

[edit] Pilot

A pilot project commenced in late 2001 and aimed to test the delivery of musical content using a selected set of digitised and born digital scores from the National Library of Australiaand the Australian Music Centre, and sound from the National Film and Sound Archive, trialling data exchange and digital delivery across music formats and institutions.

[edit] Pilot to Production

The aim for a production service was to build a cooperative Australian music data-set, as well as a sustainable service model, with Music Australia functioning as both a content provider to and a subject based view of the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD)

This required:

  • Methodologies and systems to be developed to support the complexity of multiple formats of music;
  • Data harvesting and exchange between many different bibliographic standards to support a centralised data set in MARC;
  • Content development and support for digitisation programs across institutions;
  • Work across both library and non-library sectors for a comprehensive coverage of the music landscape, when many music organisations were creating and using data in a myriad of ways and data types.

[edit] Resource database

Music Australia was to consist of 2 linked databases, one for the resource description and one for people and organisation information. The resource database, as a sub-set of the ANDB, was to manage its data in MARC format. This made the data harvest and exchange from libraries and institutions using MARC relatively easy to manage, and to use to develop and build the service as the project team had solid experience with MARC based systems. However for music organisations, communities and special projects that were generating shareable data in non-MARC format, we had to explore and develop a methodology to harvest, map and convert a wide range of data types into MARC, initially converting the data via MODS to MARC, and stored in MARCXML. Later in the development, the methodology changed, moving to direct conversion, some needing initial hand crafting, from the data standard used by an organisation contributing records to Music Australia into MARC, then MARCXML.

[edit] People and organisation database

The people and organisation information was to be sourced from a number of areas and contributors. The Project team investigated a number of potential schemas and data formats for this party database during 2003-2004. These investigations indicated that there was no mature schema with which to structure identfying and contextual information about people and organisations associated with Australian music for the Music Australia service. The Project team undertook to develop and implement its own schema, called Music Australia Party Schema (MAPS). As MADShad not yet been published, it was decided to use MODS elements where possible, incorporating some EAC elements, and to use appropriate terminology from MODS and EAC. Following publications of MADS, the MAPS schema was adjusted to reflect many of the MADS structure and terms. Various models or architectures applicable to a federated people and organisation database had to be considered, with the need to deliver data harvested from many different databases using many different standards, and the need to manage duplicated or even contradictory contextual information, and present this to users in a coherent manner.

[edit] Content

As part of the content generation the National Library developed a cooperative plan with the state libraries to digitize Australian sheet music within their emerging digitisation programs. Some state libraries, such as Queensland and Western Australia, also developed arts initiatives to perform and record hitherto unknown historic musical works pertaining to their regions, and others, such as the State Library of South Australia, commenced programs to digitally preserve and deliver sound recordings.

[edit] Music Australia 1.0

Music Australia 1.0 was successfully launched in March 2005 with a wide and substantial range of content from major and minor contributing institutions. Soon after release the service faced more challenges and changes, motivated by the need for sustainability amidst rapidly changing digital information business models and in response to external demands and user feedback.

The rapid changes in the music industry, driven by new technology and delivery models, posed many challenges for the service as we strived to stay relevant and to provide to users, for research or recreation, access to Australian music resources. The need to increase and to provide access to Australian digital music, both historical and contemporary, from printed music to the latest digital audio downloads, for users was a driving force as we looked to improve our service.

[edit] Music Australia 2.0

A new business to government[1] partnership with an Australian digital music supplier provided the opportunity for the service to offer to users access to a database of Australian contemporary online tracks and albums, with 30 second sound samples and pathways for legal digital downloads through e-commerce, while protecting the rights of artists and performers with digital rights management processes.

This B2G, together with identified service enhancements and bug fixes, combined with recommendations from a user and web usability survey commissioned in 2006, drove the changes to Music Australia 1.0. and resulted in the release of Music Australia 2.0 in April 2007.

[edit] Future developments

The music industry, with its rapidly changing environment, together with innovative technologies, digitisation and the Web 2.0, continues to provide challenges and opportunities to streamline and broaden our Music Australia service into the future, to provide users with simple and easy access to Australian music resources and information, wherever they may be, for both research and recreation.

[edit] References

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[edit] External links