“It’s long past time for media ownership to be recognized as an essential right. The Internet Archive and all other digital libraries and archives must be protected, and people need to see this ludicrously unethical suit by big publishers for what it is: an assault on art and truth and its protection for posterity.”
“For librarians who specialize in caring for music collections, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest technology and resources in the profession. The Music Library Association recently helped address this problem by making many of its publications openly available online.
The MLA donated 21 of its monographs to the Internet Archive for digitization and worked with authors to make the material free to the public under Creative Commons licenses.
The new collection of backlist titles includes information on careers in music librarianship and history of the field. It also covers planning and building music library collections, which can be complicated and involve individual creators and small publishers, said Kathleen DeLaurenti, who helped lead the partnership with the Internet Archive in her role as MLA’s first open access editor. There are also valuable materials on music library approaches to technical services—everything from how to preserve music materials to how to bind and catalog them….”
“30,000 photographs, 500 first editions of Chopin’s works, more than 3,000 issues of 19th-century magazines, almost 1,000 hours of recordings, manuscripts, works, Fryderyk Chopin’s correspondence, hundreds of iconographic objects and works of art – the largest Chopin collection in the world is now available online for free!…”
“Our ambition is to build a comprehensive data source and online data analysis tools for the European music industry. This requires a map of the music ecosystem — we need to understand where value is created and money is exchanged, and we need to observe how much is this value and how much is being paid for it….”
“On January 1, 2022, an estimated 400,000 sound recordings published before 1923 will enter the public domain thanks to a law passed in 2018. This is significant because, until 2022, no sound recording has entered the public domain due to copyright expiration.
The UC Santa Barbara Library has already digitally preserved over 60,000 of those recordings from its collection, which will now be freely accessible to anybody, for any purpose, in high-resolution formats. …”
“About 2,000 rare early opera recordings, including cylinders and 78 RPMs valued at $300,000, were recently donated to the UCSB Library Special Research Collections Performing Arts Collection to be digitized and made available to the public.”
Abstract: While the idea of reference sources has become synonymous with the internet, online scholarly encyclopedias in music are currently only accessible to those affiliated with institutions that can afford expensive annual subscriptions and to those individuals who purchase costly personal subscriptions. Meanwhile, backup print copies have been inaccessible in libraries closed for the COVID-19 pandemic or closed to unaffiliated visitors. An open access scholarly music encyclopedia could solve these access problems while increasing the visibility and relevance of music scholarship and expanding the possible modes of digital analysis. This paper considers existing models of open access and identifies some potential paths forward for an open access scholarly subject encyclopedia, including leveraging Wikipedia, creating a new encyclopedia, or lobbying publishers to convert existing music encyclopedias to open access using a “subscribe to open” funding model.
“Published by the UCLA Music Library in eScholarship, the Contemporary Music Score Collection includes the digital, open access scores from the Contemporary Score Edition series, the first open access edition of new music published by a library, and scores from the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library. For more information about how to use or search the collection, see the Contemporary Music Score Collection Guide. …”
“The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a 21st century community-driven open-source effort to define guidelines for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure.
It brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to discuss and define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are then formalized into the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema. This schema is developed and maintained by the MEI Technical Team….”
“Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued….”
“The Amra project, led by music historian Dr Ann Buckley at Trinity’s Medieval History Research Centre, is aiming to digitise and make freely available online over 300 manuscripts containing liturgical material associated with some 40 Irish saints which are located in research libraries across Europe….”
“Almost five years ago, we warned that years of copyright maximalists brainwashing the public about ever expansive copyright and the need for everything to be “owned” had resulted in the crazy Blurred Lines decision that said that merely being inspired by another artist to make a song that has a similar feel, even if it doesn’t copy any actual part of the music, was infringing. We warned that this would lead to bad things — and it has.
Over the last few years, we’ve been detailing story after story of similar cases being filed. It’s become so common that we don’t even bother to write about most of the cases. As we’ve said, though, this really is the industry reaping what they’ve sowed. It’s gotten so crazy that even the RIAA (yes, that RIAA) has felt the need to tell courts that maybe their interpretation of copyright has gone too far in the direction of over-protecting copyright holders.
It’s now become such a fact of life that the NY Times has a giant article on how copyright is basically eating pop music these days. …”
Abstract: The importance of open access (OA) advocacy is well-documented in the literature of academic librarianship, but previous research shows that librarians’ OA behaviors are less conclusive. This article compares the self-archiving practices of music librarians and musicologists to see how librarians rank in OA adoption. Availability of articles published from 2013 to 2017 in six green OA journals in music librarianship and musicology indicates a need for continued advocacy and enhanced understanding of OA policies and opportunities.
Abstract: Hip-Hop music, business, distribution, and culture exhibit highly-comparable trends in the scholarly communication and publication industry. This article discusses Hip-Hop artists and research authors as content creators, each operating within marketplaces still adjusting to digital, online connectivity. These discussions are intended for classroom use, where students may access their existing knowledge framework of popular media and apply it to a new understanding of the scholarly communication environment. Research instructors and librarians may discover new perspectives to familiar issues through conversations with students engaging with this material in a novel way.
“The Loeb Music Library digitizes scores and libretti selected for their rare or unique natures and their popularity as objects of research and teaching.
By providing online access to these items, the library makes primary source materials available for use at Harvard and around the world.
This digital collection includes manuscripts, first editions, and early editions of music from the 17th to the early 20th century. Many items, such as variant editions and annotated proofs of 19th-century operas and related libretti, are meant to be seen and used together. As a group, they give scholars a window into the study of historical performance practice….”