Jon W. Dunn

VARIATIONS: a digital music library system at Indiana University

The field of music provides an interesting context for the development of digital library systems due to the variety of information formats used by music students and scholars. The VARIATIONS digital library project at Indiana University currently delivers online access to sound recordings from the collections of IU’s William and Gayle Cook Music Library and is developing access to musical score images and other formats. This paper covers the motivations for the creation of VARIATIONS, an overview of its operation and implementation, user reactions to the system, and future plans for development.

Variations2: retrieving and using music in an academic setting

University music students, teachers, and researchers discover and retrieve musical works and navigate within them, then create annotations and share them with other users.

A digital library data model for music

In this paper, we introduce a data and metadata model being developed for use in a music digital library system to support search and navigation of music content in multiple formats.

V2V: a second variation on query-by-humming

Music information retrieval (MIR) systems tend to fall into two camps: that camp developing cataloging and providing advanced access systems for large collections of music and that camp developing specific query or access mechanisms. We have started to merge these camps by integrating Variations2, which provides access to a digitized portion of Indiana Universitys vast music library, with Michigans VocalSearch, which provides a query-by-humming (QBH) search engine. The joint system, V2V, demonstrates how QBH can be used in connection with a large number of holdings in a real-world environment.

Indiana university digital music library project

The Indiana University Digital Music Library project plans to create a digital library testbed system containing music in a variety of formats, designed to support research and education in the field of music and to serve as a platform for digital library research. Prototypes of user interfaces to the system will be demonstrated.

Faceted search for heterogeneous digital collections

The idea of faceted search has received growing attentions in the digital library field for its potential of improving user satisfaction by combing the query and browse strategies interactively. Furthermore, with the trend of using digital repositories as the central infrastructure for curation and preservation, there is a demand for a single search interface providing public access to all the diversified content stored in the repositories. In this demo, we present Digital Collections Search, a system that is designed to assist users who are unfamiliar with the subject of their information needs locating relevant items as well exploring related but unknown collections in the repository.

Digital music libraries - research and development

Digital music libraries provide enhanced access and functionality that facilitates scholarly research and education. This panel will present a report on the progress of several major research and development projects in digital music libraries.

Variations2: a digital music library system

This demonstration will show version 1.0 of the Variations2 digital library system developed by Indiana University. Variations2 is being built to provide access to music in a variety of formats-sound recordings, scanned musical scores, computer score notation files, and video-and is designed to support research and learning in the field of music.

The avalon media system: a platform for access-controlled delivery of time-based media

This demonstration will show version 1.0 of the Avalon Media System, an open source system being developed by Indiana University and Northwestern University to allow libraries and archives to provide online access to audio and video collections.

Variations2: improving music findability in a digital library through work-centric metadata

Summary form only given. The Variations2 Indiana University Digital Music Library is a large test-bed project funded in part by Phase 2 of the Digital Libraries Initiative, with support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This demonstration shows the current state of the Variations2 test-bed software, focusing on the search user interface. Libraries of digitized multimedia content provide access to virtual entities. In the case of music, where there may be many performances and arrangements of a given work, newer metadata models that are less item-centric or book-centric promise superior search capabilities for digital library users. The Variations2 metadata model is one such model. Like the functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) from the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) our model is work-centric. Moreover, we have implemented a digital music library system based on that metadata model. One benefit of the Variations2 search user interface is the use of music-specific search fields such as key or performer. A second benefit is the ability to navigate directly to the desired work within a multiwork item. A third benefit is the introduction of stepwise disambiguation of the users search criteria. The disambiguation process varies depending both on what fields the user fills in and the actual content of the digital library. Thus our implementation demonstrates some of the benefits of a work-centric, music-specific metadata model.