Digital Music Library System

Hey folks,

This is a re-post from a list I subscribe to. It sounds like a great solution for those of you who may be interested in digital music libraries...

Indiana University today announces the release of open source software to
create a digital music library system. The software, called Variations, provides
online access to streaming audio and scanned score images in support of
teaching, learning, and research.

Variations enables institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights.

A key feature of the system for faculty and students is the ability to create bookmarks and playlists for use in studying or in preparing classroom presentations, allowing easy access later on to specific audio time points or segments. A key feature for libraries is a flexible access control and authentication system, which allows libraries to set up access rules based on their own local institutional policies.

This software is the culmination of nearly fifteen years of development and use of
digital music library systems at Indiana University. Creation of the current Variations software platform was originally funded by the National Science
Foundation. In 2005, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded
Indiana University a National Leadership Grant to extend this highly successful
system to the nationwide library community. Beyond IU, the software is currently
being used at the Ohio State University, University of Maryland, New England
Conservatory of Music, and the Philadelphia area Tri-College Consortium
(Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr).

This open source release of Variations complements IU’s earlier release of the open source Variations Audio Timeliner, which lets users identify relationships in passages of music, annotate their findings, and play back the results with simple point-and-click navigation. This tool is also included as a feature of the complete Variations
system.

Indiana University plans to offer a free one-hour Variations webinar at 4:00 PM EST on March 4, 2009 for institutions and individuals interested in learning more about the system. To register, e-mail mnotess@indiana.edu.

The Indiana University Digital Library Program created Variations in collaboration with faculty and students in IU’s Jacobs School of Music. The IU Digital Library Program is a collaborative effort of the Indiana University Libraries and the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.

For more information on the Variations open source release, see: http://variations.sourceforge.net/

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Jon Dunn
Associate Director for Technology
Indiana
University Digital Library Program
IU Libraries / University Information
Technology Services
jwd@indiana.edu
(812) 855-0953

This is a reposting from David Lowe and Michael J. Bennett at UConn Libraries. The results of their survey on JPEG 2000 are now available...

• First, thanks very much to those who responded this past fall to our survey of digital project staff regarding JPEG 2000 implementation at your institutions. We have made the results available via our institutional repository at:
  
  http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/16/
  
  You may choose to download the survey results as a standalone .xls spreadsheet file or, if you prefer a somewhat smoother viewing experience, download and extract the .html version contained in the zip file at the same URL.
  
  From our abstract:
  The survey results reveal several key areas that JPEG 2000’s user community will need to have addressed in order to further enhance adoption of the standard, including perspectives from cultural institutions that have adopted it already, as well as insights from institutions that do not currently have it in their workflows. Current users areconcerned about limited compatible software capabilities with an eye toward needed enhancements. They realize also that there is much room for improvement in the area of educating and informing the cultural heritage community about the advantages of JPEG 2000. A small set of users, in addition, alerts us to serious problems of cross-codec consistency and they relate file validation issues that would likely be easily resolved given a modicum of collaborative attention toward standardization. Responses from non-users disclose that there are lingering questions surrounding the format and its stability and permanence, stoked largely by a dearth of currently available software functionality, from the point of initial capture and manipulation on through to delivery to online users.

JPEG 2000 is a promising format for long-term preservation of documents. Let's hope that acceptance grows rapidly.

Cheers!