Approval of the musiconn project phase 2024-2026

News in the musiconn portal

For all those who would like to register for the FID licenses for musicology, there is now support with registration in the form of two new tutorials (only available in German):

The tutorial "User group of the FID licenses musicology" clarifies exactly which persons can register for the FID licenses musicology.

The tutorial "Registration for the FID licenses musicology" then guides you step by step through the registration process.

In addition to the integration of new services in the musiconn portal, the last funding phase also included the translation of the website into English, which is now available at: https://www.musiconn.de/en/

RISM Catalog

As part of the FID Musicology, the RISM Catalog is technically provided and continuously developed at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. This service makes the data of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) project accessible free of charge via the Internet. More than 1.5 million music sources are currently searchable.

A new version of the online catalog has been available as a beta version since December 2023: https://opac.rism.info/rism/

The focus of the new development is the technical switch from the TouchPoint research software to the VuFind system. The new version of the online catalog offers a new design and, above all, increased usability. Thanks to a large VuFind community within the Specialized Information Services, positive synergy effects can also be expected in future with regard to maintenance and further development potential.

Some new functionalities have also been developed in the course of the adaptation: the music incipits, for example, are now displayed directly in the result list and the sequence of notes searched for is also highlighted in colour in the graphics. The previous system will continue to be offered in parallel until the end of the beta phase.

FID Licenses

The FID licenses for musicology have been extended by a new license: "Recent Researches in Music Online (RRIMO)" is a full-text database for over 750 volumes of scholarly editions of musical works from the Middle Ages to the 20^th century (scores and individual part editions) published by A-R Editions since 1964. They come from the nine "Recent researches" series for Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, Renaissance, Baroque Era, Classical Era, Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, American Music, Yale University (1. and 2. series) and Oral Traditions. There is a moving wall of 5 years for the latest volumes.

The text parts of the publications are fully searchable; the volumes are also indexed with structural data. The music texts can be printed out or downloaded for private use.

Information on other products and registration for the FID licenses can be found on the musiconn website.

Update musiconn.performance

The musical event database musiconn.performance currently contains almost 65,000 musical events and a total of almost 160,000 data on the people, places, sources, institutions and works involved. A major update at the end of 2023 will also make new functions available: Performance data can now also be researched and displayed via map or calendar views as well as via a gallery of the stored digital copies.

In addition, since December 2023, indexing work with musiconn.performance has been easier: a new entry mask, which the more than 20 project partners from research and concert institutions can use to work directly in the front end of the event database, supports and simplifies the creation of new concert data as well as the editing of older data records. A new menu navigation helps with the structured entry of individual data, provides mandatory fields and a variety of other input options. The individual input fields are now provided with suggestion lists so that standardized personal data, work titles, venues and institutions can be selected quickly. A new preview makes it possible to immediately check how the data will be displayed to users when entering the information. Project partners can now decide for themselves when their data is published: It is now possible to release changes or additions to concert events as well as newly created information directly or to work with hidden data records first. User sessions also allow those entering data from the projects to work on different data sets at the same time without having to save them in the database or publish them on the website. After this major update, minor bugs occur from time to time, but these are being worked on at full speed.

New content on musiconn.publish

In recent months, musiconn.publish has enabled us to make a whole series of hybrid and secondary publications available to the specialist community in open access. We have worked together with publishing houses such as Bärenreiter, edition text+kritik, Allitera, Edition Argus and Olms. In the future, we want to further expand this collaboration and make older, sometimes already out-of-print publications from our specialist publishers available online via musiconn.publish, but also support the hybrid publication of current specialist literature. We are happy to advise editors, authors and publishers on the possibilities of cooperation and look forward to receiving your inquiries.

In this context, we are currently also increasing our efforts to publish monographic series on musiconn.publish: In the next few days, we will be able to put many volumes of the series Musik im Diskurs and Musikpädagogik im Diskurs published by the Gesellschaft für Musikpädagogik online.

As before, it is also possible to submit publications on our service musiconn.publish without the involvement of a publisher. This applies in particular to qualification publications. We will also be happy to advise you on this!

Workshop musiconn.audio

FID Musicology and NFDI4Culture had invited over 200 participants from research and cultural heritage institutions: On November 16 and 17, 2023, they met for a virtual exchange on "Audio(visual) cultural heritage and research data. Requirements for workflows, metadata and repositories". Various portals, projects and archives provided insights into their workshops. The focus was on sharing experiences and challenges at all stages of the audiovisual data life cycle: from digitization to description and publication.

We started with three projects that are based at the SLUB Dresden: The state-to-state program "Safeguarding Saxony's audio-visual heritage", which enables institutions and private individuals to digitize audio and visual material, was presented by Lukas Schneider. André Eckardt and Erik Sommer explained the SLUB's further development of the open source software Kitodo, which is intended to facilitate the digitization and metadata enrichment of AV materials. The FID service musiconn.audio was presented by Barbara Wiermann and Martha Stellmacher: The musicological repository for audio and audiovisual research data is to be made available free of charge to projects and individual researchers in thse future. Rolf Bader then explained the COMSAR project, which is based at the University of Hamburg and uses AI to analyze audio and video recordings.

On the second day, employees from four audio and video archives reported on their experiences with data collection, backup and provision: Herdis Kley and Cord Pagenstecher spoke about the FU Berlin's new portal Oral-History.Digital, where life history interviews can be indexed and stored. Sven Strobel and Matti Stöhr provided insights into the TIB AV-Portal, an OA platform for scientific videos with a focus on natural sciences and technology. Maurice Mengel explained the work in the museum database MuseumPlus, in which the holdings of the Phonogramm-Archiv of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin are also indexed. Finally, Felix Rau from the Data Center for the Humanities at the University of Cologne presented the Language Archive Cologne. The repository, to which researchers are welcome to submit their data, focuses on endangered languages and oral literature.

In addition to the exchange on specific tools, workflows and solutions for long-term archiving, the final discussion was characterized by a constructive dialogue on how uniform data standards for better interoperability can be developed jointly and across disciplinary boundaries. The event, which was jointly organized by musiconn and NFDI4Culture, was a complete success and not only showed that the secure storage and archiving of audio and video files is already important in many different fields of research, but also confirmed that with musiconn.audio, the Specialized Information Service for Musicology has reacted early to a research trend that will have a decisive influence on future research and research data work, and not only in musicology.