Music Preservation

[Hal Allert]

In an earlier post we were discussing how each of us files his/her music in their own library.  Most of the music we have is a copy of the original with some exceptions. I would like to know if any of you have given thought to your libraries and their continued existence after you are gone. I, for one, have a large library that I have been adding to over the years and I am concerned that when I die my library will just be thrown away with no thought as to its value. But, is there any value to your library? Most of us have the same songs in our libraries so it isn't like mine are the only copies of these rare songs.

What would you like to see happen to your library when you are gone? Should there be a central clearinghouse where one copy of each song is kept for posterity? The American Banjo Fraternity has a very large collection that is not easily accessed. Should we be sending them digital copies of our libraries to enable them to complete their collection? Would they have the resources to manage the digital versions of their paper copies? Should I be the one to put my library online for all to access. Should you send me your library and have me add it to my library online? What happens when I die, who would become the archivist of this enormous collection?

I have been thinking of these things because now is the time to plan for that time when your name will be written down by a bony hand in the cold diary of death.

[Russ Chandler]

I'm a professional web developer and happy to help out too although it looks like the technical side is covered.

I don't think it would be a problem technically to convert tiff files to jpgs or pdfs on the fly depending on what suits the user. With pdfs we could even group them together into parts like in a folio. 

I'd also suggest that midi and even copyright free mp3's of tunes should be included where they are availbale. Why not?

Categorisation is going to be pretty straight forward - Trapdoor pretty much nails it.

One other feature that might be cool would be to have user ratings and even a discussion board for each tune. They mostly wouldn't be used but the discussions could be very helpful where they take place and because my sight reading isn't up to much I'd appreciate having an indication of how good everybody thinks a tune is before I invest a lot of time working it out.

Sadly I don't have the time to take on the most important job if this idea is going to have legs which is to take responsibility for driving and managing the project - do we have any volunteers?

[thereallyniceman]

It is great to see all the interest and the offers of scores for an online library!

My son is the senior database developer for an international web development company based in Germany and is doing our MySQL database programming for free!! He is here in the UK at the moment so I am pestering him constantly. 

I have been in discussions regarding a database integration into the Ning site for some months. My project specification already contains 99% of the suggestions made by posters!

I already have server hosting established as my son needed a specific type of high speed server which  allows the facilities required to communicate with Ning and for the image processing that I wanted.

I am not yet sure whether or not Ning is the best place host a World Wide Scores Database, but we needed a database on NING as our photos sections was, by default, being used for scores uploads and was not easy to search.

I have a pile of original banjo scores a foot thick, and many are large format. I am slowly scanning these and will incorporate them onto NING, but if it is decided that a "Global Database" is required elsewhere I am sure that we can all learn from my experiences here on NING and all the uploads will be freely available.

I hope that the "Database volunteers" will please just hold off for a short while and wait to see what we come up with. 

A Happy New Year to you all, 

Ian

[Russ Chandler]

Don't pester the poor bugger constantly! It's Christmas!! :-)

[thereallyniceman]

From 0 - 22 years he pestered me...  now it is just sweet revenge !

;-)

[Jody Stecher]

A few random thoughts: making available digital duplicates of the original large format scores is a fine thing indeed. The *look* of these old sheets is part of the charm. They look very much as they sound. A score generated by software is just as accurate of course, and printers' errors can be corrected that way but somehow it's not quite the full experience. So I'm happy the big pages are being scanned.

As to whether Ning is suitable: will Ning exist in 10 years?  Will there be websites in 20 years or will there be some other paradigm ?  There should be several storage copies, in several locations, of the expanding collection, updated at regular intervals or the whole thing could just vanish.

[Trapdoor2]

Nothing lasts forever...but we can try. ;-) One good thing about digital media on the web is that it is distributed to hundreds, if not thousands of storehouses where it is routinely archived (without us knowing or having a hand in it). Once we publish it, almost everyone here (at least) will download the entire thing. Many will print out every single piece. The best chance we have to allow this archive to survive is broad distribution.

We cannot control the future...but I think we're on the right track. The worst thing we can do is to become divisive and lose our momentum. Let's not do that.

And, yes. I prefer to keep the form/format of the old sheets. I had a discussion with Eli Kaufman about digital copies of the music and his preference is to simply capture the music itself (just the dots). For my part, I will be digitizing my collection to include all sheets (cover, back-page ads, etc.). The cover art on some of this stuff is wonderful...sometimes better than the music inside.

[Jody Stecher]

I agree, Marc. The ambience of the originals is worth keeping when possible. Thanks for doing this. Isn't it more work to copy out the dots and enter them into some digital music writer? Sure, photocopying is work as well but probably takes less time.

[Trapdoor2]

Far easier to photograph or scan, for sure. I only copy them out to generate TAB so that I can learn the piece, or listen to it.

What I'm waiting for is a really smart bit of OCR (optical character recognition) software that will read/interpret the music directly from a scan. SmartScore does a really good job with very clean and clear copies but often the fuzzyness of elderly music gives it problems. Perhaps in a few years it will be better. I haven't tested any new software in a while...it might already be better!