ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 73 | February 2005
MusicAustralia
In the August 2002 edition of Gateways, the National Library announced the release of its Digital Music Collection. And in the October 2002 edition, the Library announced the release of the MusicAustralia pilot. The National Library and its development partner, the National Film and Sound Archive (formerly known as ScreenSound The development of MusicAustralia has created exciting learning journeys for many library and archives professionals across the nation—not just those in Canberra. When the project began in late 2001, there were no digital printed music collections in Developing and delivering these digital music collections has posed huge challenges to dedicated music librarians and IT professionals across the nation. There is no ‘out-of-the-box’ solution to these issues, and there is still much learning to come—especially in the area of delivering sound so that even those with poor bandwidth can listen to it anywhere, anytime. Overcoming those pesky copyright problems is another difficulty. The changes to date have not occurred by accident! One of the great challenges for the MusicAustralia project team has been simultaneously encouraging the development of Australian digital music content while developing a service for all Australians to ‘find’ and ‘get’ both online and offline music resources with ease. The MusicAustralia pilot—delivered in August 2002—assisted with both aims. Organisations with rich music holdings could see the potential MusicAustralia offered, and managed to redirect scarce resources towards digitisation. The MusicAustralia team assessed the pilot—based on the PictureAustralia model—and decided to leverage off the strong music content from the National Bibliographic Database, at the same time initiating the development of new National Library infrastructure to support the addition of non MARC records from a range of contributors to the NBD and other databases. The NBD is the ‘source database’ for MusicAustralia resources. MusicAustralia benefits greatly from all the hard work done in the NBD environment, including contribution and data management and match and merge operations. NBD contributors benefit as they do not need to do anything ‘special’ in order to expose their music collections in MusicAustralia. And of course the NBD reflects a richer record of Those familiar with the new Libraries Australia service described elsewhere in this edition will notice many similarities between the two services. Like Libraries Australia, MusicAustralia offers a simple ‘Google’ style search, together with an Advanced Search allowing users to limit their searches to certain resource types, to certain date ranges and/or to material held in individual Australian states. It also offers a range of options for ‘getting’ MusicAustralia content —more than 90% of which is not available online—including purchasing through document delivery services and online retailers. Records can be emailed, downloaded or saved for the duration of the session. MusicAustralia is a free resource but, in late 2005, we hope to offer even more services to registered Kinetica customers, including the ability to save records and searches between sessions, and to create ‘alerts’ to what’s new in the service. Although it embodies some similar features, MusicAustralia is not merely a ‘clone’ of Libraries Australia. In addition to 130 000+ resource descriptions, the service includes thousands of records about Australian musicians and music groups, sourced from the National Authority File and from various contributors of structured data about people. Many of these records—including the ones created at the National Library to showcase its own music collections—include biographies, pictures, birth and death dates and places, musical activity, and personal awards. MusicAustralia users therefore get an ‘integrated’ view of the people and resources that make up the music world. The service also offers curated views of aspects of Australian music, including music about each Australian state, contemporary indigenous music, music of the bush and beach, and yes, even Waltzing Matilda! For more information on MusicAustralia, visit the website at <www.musicaustralia.org>, or email musaust@nla.gov.au. Enjoy! |