A Specialized Open Archives Initiative Harvester for Sheet Music: A Project Report and Examination of Issues

Abstract

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Sheet Music Project is a consortium of institutions building OAI-compliant data providers, a metadata harvester, and a web-based service provider for digital sheet music collections. The project aims to test the viability of the OAI standard for providing access to sheet music collections on the web, and to build a permanent and increasingly participatory service for the discovery of digital sheet music. The service provider design has been informed by detailed usability testing, and by limitations imposed by the variations in metadata harvested from the different participating collections. Advanced services in addition to basic searching and browsing have been developed, including the ability to save and share subsets across participating collections. Harvesting and searching strategies for overcoming metadata limitations are being developed. The consortium is seeking additional participants with digital sheet music collections, and is exploring the possibility of incorporating scores and audio into the project.