Digital Library Adaptation for Traditional Music and Content-Based Research: Polish Sound Archives and dLibra

The existence of numerous and rich traditional music collections, their importance for preserving cultural heritage and an increasing interest in this type of music were the key factors leading to the concept of a music research support environment for ethnomusicologists. Our experience with Polish traditional music collections and archives shows that their existence is not equivalent to their availability for search, retrieval, processing and analysis. The idea behind the environment is to provide stable infrastructure and software solutions necessary to enable musicological research and, in a wider perspective, to open traditional music resources for a larger group of users. The paper describes our motivation for building such music research support environment and a number of issues and challenges we have encountered in the process. We present the environment concept, building stages already completed and plans for its further development. The environment is founded on the dLibra digital library adapted to the requirements of traditional music content and collections and with consideration for the current needs of ethnomusicologists. It combines the advantages of a user-centric layered digital library and Linked Open Data enrichment with system-centric music processing tools. A few of such tools have already been developed, for example, to support automatic music transcription of a large number of recordings in order to make them available for research and analysis. Future development plans include content aggregation and content-based indexing and search.