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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 57| June 2002


MusicAustralia Project Manager Appointed

Dr Marie-Louise Ayres

Dr Marie-Louise Ayres took up her position as Project Manager of MusicAustralia on 11 March 2002. Prior to her commencement with the National Library, Marie-Louise was both the Project Manager of AustLit, the Australian Literature Gateway, and Manager of Special Collections and Services at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. As part of the multi-institution AustLit team, Marie-Louise secured substantial Australian Research Council funding—together with cash and in-kind contributions from eight universities and the National Library—to amalgamate and enhance a dozen specialist Australian information sources into a single web-based service, released in late 2001. AustLit is based on a number of innovative data models, including IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, and interoperates with several major Australian information sources, including Kinetica (for holdings information), the Australian Libraries Gateway (for locating holding libraries), PictureAustralia (for author photographs), and the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts and the Guide to Australian Literary Manuscripts (for archival holdings information). AustLit is likely to work with MusicAustralia in the future, as there is considerable cross-over between the two subject areas. In her role as Manager of Special Collections, Marie-Louise developed and managed one of Australia’s most important literary manuscript collections, and was heavily involved in the 2000 project to introduce the use of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) in Australian collecting agencies.

As Project Manager, MusicAustralia, Marie-Louise is currently coordinating cross institution teams at the National Library and ScreenSound Australia to deliver a pilot demonstrating single service delivery of digital musical materials in a variety of forms: digitised sheet music, digital audio files, digitised text and images, and some ‘symbolic scores’ (musical scores created using sophisticated software packages) provided by the Australian Music Centre. The MusicAustralia team is particularly interested in the possibilities of using existing data to draw out relationships between individual music items—such as an audio recording of a particular piece of sheetmusic—and in the myriad of technical and rights issues associated with delivering this content over the Web.

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