National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 58| August 2002


Digital Music Collections: National Library Music Online

‘Hurrah for the Bat & Ball: The Universal Cricket Song’  1896—cover ‘Hurrah for the Bat & Ball: The Universal Cricket Song’  1896—page five
Warren Russell
‘Hurrah for the Bat & Ball: The Universal Cricket Song’  1896
cover and page five
Music Collection  nla.mus–an20203585
‘Advance Australia Fair’  1900–1909—cover ‘Advance Australia Fair’  1900–1909—page one
Peter Dodds McCormick (1834?–1916)
‘Advance Australia Fair’  1900–1909
cover and page one
Music Collection  nla.mus–an6012238

The National Library has embarked on a major digitisation program to provide greater access to its ‘treasures’, through the digitisation of its special collections material including photographs, postcards, cartoons, drawings, maps, manuscripts and sheet music. Many of these treasures are already available on the Internet through the Library’s catalogue, federated services such as PictureAustralia (www.pictureaustralia.org), and through the Library’s multimedia publications and online exhibitions.

In July 2002, a substantial portion of the Library’s sheet music treasures will become similarly available. The initial release will include over 1900 sheet music items, with this number expected to grow to over 3500 items in the next year. The Library’s Digital Music Collection will include a substantial portion of the National Library holdings of sheet music published before 1930 and with a strong Australian association: Australian composer, librettist or arranger; Australian subjects; or Australian places of publication.

Readers searching for pieces of sheet music through the Library’s catalogue will now find a URL web link to digitised items on the catalogue record. The links lead directly to online copies, delivered through the Library’s digital delivery system, optimised for music items. The system provides web access (www.nla.gov.au/digicoll/) to digitised sheet music items in context with their bibliographic descriptions.

Making this sheet music material available online unlocks the hidden treasures of our musical culture. Some iconic pieces have previously been highlighted through the Library’s 2001 Between the Sheets exhibition (due to tour regional centres from later this year) and Curator of Music Robyn Holmes’ accompanying text, The Collector’s Book of Sheet Music Covers. But online delivery means that many more such treasures can be made available to all Australians—not just those who can visit the Library’s reading rooms.

The collection’s interest is by no means restricted to musicians and musical researchers! Song lyrics tell us much about the attitudes of their day, cover illustrations are often artworks in their own right, and the interaction between popular music and the commercial world can be tracked through the ‘stories’ which cover advertisements tell.

There is something in the Digital Music Collections for everyone. Perhaps the Australian cricket team might consider adopting Warren Russell’s 1896 Hurrah for the Bat & Ball: The Universal Cricket Song as its anthem? Taxpayers might feel that Jack Lumsdaine’s wonderful 1930 Banish the Budget Blues is as pertinent today as it was in Scullin’s day with its lament, ‘A tax on bags, a tax on fags, a tax on wooden legs, to provide the Old Age Pension for the Grocer’s new laid eggs’! Romantics and old time musical buffs will be thrilled to find I was Dreaming, as sung by Miss Gladys Moncrieff. School students might be amazed by the Anglo-centrism of the earliest versions of our national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. Many community members will be glad that Ella Southworth Clark’s confident 1910 prediction, The Battle’s On or Prohibition’s Bound to Win, failed to eventuate.

‘Banish the Budget Blues’  1930—cover
Jack Lumsdaine
‘Banish the Budget Blues’  1930
cover
Music Collection 
nla.mus–an8527093

Sheet music material being delivered at present is either in the public domain, or is made available through the kind permission of rights holders. This wonderful heritage material is made available online through the infrastructure developed through the Digital Services Project. This includes support for the capture, storage, management, identification, access, delivery and long-term preservation of digital collections. Items are scanned by the Digitisation Team, stored on the Library’s Digital Object Storage System, managed through the NLA-developed Digital Collections Manager application, and delivered via the generic digital objects delivery system. Implementation of a naming scheme and resolver service for persistent identification of digital collection items ensures that these items can be cited and referenced online with confidence.

A key aim in developing the Digital Music Collection delivery system was to make the experience of viewing digitised music items as close as possible to the experience of handling original items: users can turn pages; jump from front cover to back cover; or navigate to particular pages within a score. Added features are the ability to zoom-in to higher resolution ‘examination’ copies, and zoom back out to the default ‘view’ copy, to view an entire score in thumbnail view—and to print a pdf copy of the item ready for playing at the piano at home or in the music school.Similarly optimised delivery systems are also under development for maps, manuscripts and audio, all of which have some ‘special’ requirements. For example, the ability to quickly zoom-in to any selected area of a map image is provided using image compression technology.

In addition to providing access to music material through the Library’s catalogue, the Digital Music Collection delivery system—and future delivery of the Library’s music-related audio recordings, pictures and manuscripts—are essential components in the development of the MusicAustralia service, which is currently in a scoping and prototyping phase. The many lessons learned through the Library’s Digital Services Project—which will be formalised as digitisation, metadata and delivery system standards—will assist many other Australian libraries as they seek to make their own rich music collections available to a much wider audience.
— Tony Boston
Director, Digital Services Branch and
—Marie-Louise Ayres

Project Manager MusicAustralia
Contact: music@nla.gov.au

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au