Issues and challenges that affect music score availability on the web

1. MUSICA BRASILIS
making available
Brazilian music scores
Dr. Rosana Lanzelotte
rosana@musicabrasilis.org.br
UNESCO’s Inter-regional Conference on Preservation dnd
Accessibility of Documentary Heritage
Panama, 24-27 October 2018

2. Carlos Gomes (1836,1896): International MOW / UNESCO 2018
Main operas
• Il Guarany (Milan, 1870)
• Fosca (Milan, 1873)
• Salvador Rosa (Genova, 1874)
• Maria Tudor (Milan, 1879)
• Lo Schiavo (Rio, 1889)
• Condor (Milan, 1891)
• Colombo (Rio, 1892)
The only non-European who succeded as an international opera composer
Most of his scores are
unavailable!

3. Music scores: difficult to access
Main archives
✓Rio de Janeiro
• Brazil’s capital for 200 years
✓BNRJ (National Library)
• The largest musical archive in
Latin America
• 50,000 scores
✓BAN (UFRJ)
• 30,000 scores
✓local access only
✓difficult copying

4. Musicians need more than manuscripts
edition

5. Music edition in Brazil
www.musicabrasilis.org (2009)
1500 scores, with separate parts
576 Brazilian composers since 18th century
74 scores by Carlos Gomes
• Active editorial industry at the beginning of 20th century
2000 different titles per year
• Now, editors stopping printed editions
✓small scale, expensive distribution
✓only songbooks and commercially viable editions
✓E.g. Carlos Gomes operas (piano version) out of print
• Solution

6. http://www.musicabrasilis.org/

7. Score filtering by time period, author name, title and instrumentation
gender coming soon

8. Large scale web availability initiative
Implementation
Open software
w3c compliance
LOD (Linked Open Data) compliance
Content
5000 digitized scores from 10 libraries and archives
500 new editions (OSESP)
Classical composers of all times, mainly public domain
Practical editions (for musicians)
FAIR Principles (2016)
Findable
Accessible
Interoperable
Reusable
Motivation: documents related to Carlos Gomes part of International MOW

9. Challenge: LOD compliance
☆ Make data available on the Web, in whatever
format, under an open license
☆☆ Available as machine-readable structured data,
(i.e., .pdf and not a scanned image).
☆☆☆ Available in a non-proprietary format, (i.e, .pdf,
not Finale).
☆☆☆☆ Published using open standards from the W3C
(RDF and SPARQL).
☆☆☆☆☆ All of the above and linked to Linked Open
Data, to provide context.
5* Tim Berners-Lee Open Data Scheme
https://www.w3.org/2011/gld/wiki/5_Star_Linked_Data

10. LOD compliance: example

11. LOD compliance: VIAF
BNRJ contributes to VIAF since 2017

12. Challenge: FAIR compliance
Wilkinson, M. D. et al. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data
management and stewardship. Scientific Data, 3, 160018.
doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18

13. Findable => Unique and Persistent Identifier
URL (Unique Record Locator)
resolved by DNS (domain name service)
URI (Unique Resource Identifier)
resolved and maintained by specialized institutions
e.g. DOI (digital object identifier for articles)

14. Accessible => digital preservation
Born-digital scores
No preservation policy

15. Interoperable, Reusable => description standard
• 2004: JSC (Joint Steering Committee) to propose a new standard
to replace AACR2
• Aligned to IFLA proposals: FRBR and FRAD
• Aligned to ICOM / CIDOC
• Focus on user tasks
ü find, identify, select and obtain resources (bibliographic
data)
ü find, identify, clarify and understand works (authority data)
• Designed for digital resources, but compliant with non-digital
• Cultural heritage: libraries, archives, museums, digital
repositories
• Designed to be used as a web tool (RDA toolkit)
RDA – Resource Description and Access

16. RDA today
• Initial Joint Steering Committee (2004)
Australia, Canada, Great Britain, United States
• DACH since 2010
(D) Germany, (A) Austria, (CH) German Switzerland
• Published in English, German, Catalan, Spanish,
Finnish, French, Italian
• France: BNF leads integration committee
• Spain going RDA
• Latin America joint discussion group
México, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica

17. Digital heritage: issues
• Good practices
• Standards
• Infra structure: repositories, digital preservation
• Government policies -> cultural infra structures
• UNESCO can help

18. Concluding Remarks: alignment to SDGs
• SDG 4 quality education:
• 4.4 …substantially increase the number of youth and adults who
have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for
employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship
“…musical training may promote the development and maintenance
of certain Executive Function skills, which could mediate the
previously reported links between musical training and enhanced
cognitive skills and academic achievement. ” (Zuk, 2014)
Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0099868
• SDG 11.4: strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard
the world’s cultural … heritage
• SDG 16.10: public access to information …

19. Bibliographic References
EL-SHERBINI, M. RDA implementation and the emergence of BIBFRAME (2018) doi: 10.4403/jlis.it-12443
HEATH, T.; BIZER, C. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Lectures on the Semantic Web:
Theory and Technology (1st edition). Synthesis. Morgan & Claypool. 2011.
http://info.slis.indiana.edu/~dingying/Teaching/S604/LODBook.pdf
IFLA / LRM. https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr-lrm/ifla-lrm-august-2017_rev201712.pdf
KOSTER, L.; WINDHOUWER, S.W. FAIR Principles for Library, Archive and Museum Collections: A proposal for
standards for reusable collections. 2018. http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/13427
LANZELOTTE, R. Por um acervo digital de partituras de música brasileira. 2018.
https://cpdoc.fgv.br/sites/default/files/cpdoc/HDRio2018_Anais.pdf
MLA. Music Library Association Best Practices for Music Cataloging Using RDA and MARC21 for Chapter 6:
Identifying Works and Expressions. 2017. http://access.rdatoolkit.org/mlabpchp6.html
RDA. http://www.rda-rsc.org
RDA / BNF. http://www.bnf.fr/fr/professionnels/rda/s.rda_objectifs.html
ZUK, J., BENJAMIN, C., KENYON, A., GAAB, N. Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Executive Functioning in
Musicians and Non-Musicians. 2014. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099868

20. http://www.musicabrasilis.org
https://www.slideshare.net/lanzelotte1