IMLS Grant for the Next Generation Sheet Music Consortium
The UCLA Library has received a National Leadership Grant of $249,342 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the creation of the “Next Generation” Sheet Music Consortium. The project will be led by the UCLA Digital Library Program in collaboration with our partners at the Indiana University Digital Library Program and will include participation by staff of several units within the UCLA Library, including the Cataloging and Metadata Center and Library Information Technology. Metadata and technical development activities will be divided between UCLA and Indiana University.
During the grant period—November 2009 to October 2011—the UCLA Library and Indiana University (IU) Library will develop tools and services to meet the needs of both data providers (libraries, museums, historical societies, and other curators of sheet music collections) and users of sheet music (musicologists, performers, cultural and art historians, etc.) as identified from several needs assessments carried out during an earlier IMLS planning grant. Tools and services developed in the project will enable institutions with limited technical knowledge (e.g. public libraries, smaller college libraries, museums, etc.) to participate in the metadata aggregation service of the Sheet Music Consortium (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic) and will provide users with a richer set of services, including the ability to contribute structured metadata to the collection, write annotations, and link to related materials of interest across consortium collections. In addition, cataloging guidelines and tools will be developed to support and encourage standardized descriptive practices and facilitate merging and downloading of metadata records from the consortium’s Web site.
The two main thrusts of the project—the lowering of barriers to participation by organizations with fewer resources, and the provision of metadata tools for both end users and collection builders—have the potential to position the Consortium as a major resource for all types of sheet music users.
About the Consortium
The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative: Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI:PMH) and the development of a rich set of innovative services as a test bed for digital library development. Current members include UCLA, which hosts Consortium services, Indiana University, Duke University, and Johns Hopkins University.
