Review: Sheet Music Consortium

Abstract

Sheet Music Consortium. UCLA Digital Library Program, Project Host; Stephen Davison, Founding Director. URL: http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/ Historically, popular sheet music has been viewed as the poor cousin of regular music scores because it was not considered relevant to serious music scholarship. But there is currently serious work under way in this field, raising many interesting questions in relation to the publishing history, reception, collecting, even artwork and other decorative imagery of the sheet music that once lurked in piano benches, then slipped into attics, and now sits quietly on library shelves. Projects such as the Sheet Music Consortium (SMC) can advance this work considerably, permitting scholars to search in several collections at once with new precision. The project is a collaboration among libraries to build “an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting,” or OAI-PMH.1 Metadata, technically, is data about data. Practically speaking, the metadata, which amounts to the indexing of names, titles, publishers, and so on, allows easy retrieval of the sheet music through these indices. As we will see, this metadata can relate to almost any aspect of the score as an object, the music and lyrics it contains, even the artwork on the cover. It is therefore essential to have good metadata in any digital project. The parameter for “sheet music,” as used here and at large, is solely based on the physical format of the score: generally, the music is in loose sheets or folios, each piece being from one …