Multimedia music sharing among mediateques: Archives and distribution to their attendees

Abstract

Archives of mediateques, theaters, music schools, conservatories, universities, etc., are the most important sources of cultural heritage. Such institutions are interested in digitizing content to (i) improve the service towards their attendees thus increasing the number of collections provided; (ii) add new multimedia and innovative functionalities to the service already provided within the content available; and (iii) save fragile materials otherwise settled to time deterioration, such as tapes, disks, documents, etc. Publishers are interested in digitizing only content which guarantees a certain return of investment and at the same time they are inclined to limit the distribution of the content located in archives, so as to control its exploitation and to preserve the content ownership. WEDELMUSIC has been defined to allow content providers to share and distribute "interactive music" with respect paid to the owner's rights. This permits the creation of a network for content-sharing mediateques that can form while respecting the owner's rights. The WEDELMUSIC solution permits the creation of a virtuoso mechanism which increases the amount of content owned by each mediateque and adds several new multimedia functionalities that can be enforced into the WEDELMUSIC objects, with a limited effort, by using and integrating the content of any format and media. The proposed solutions, models, and tools were defined and developed, including adequate protection and monitoring solutions. The solution was validated by a real music mediateque in Milan that has completely adopted the solution.