Music documents digitisation programme

The BDI Guide Committee, giving to the music within the Italian Cultural Heritage its lead role, after the historical catalogues digitisation programme, decided to proceed with the funding of projects concerning the music heritage collected in public state libraries, music conservatories, municipal libraries, and historical archives.

The music memory, constituted by documents with manuscripts and printed music, opera libretto, music theory treats, by audio and audiovisual documents, by documents coming from historical and theatre archives, constitutes a documenatry font of primary importance in the world.

This material selection to digitise has been due to the fact that a music database, within the SBN network, was already available, and cataloguing and digitising archives of this music heritage have been realized.

Among these activities there is the Archivio Digitale Della Musica Veneta (ADMV) considered by the Guide Committee as a good practice example to extend and generalize in the other Italian library institutes.

The ADMV has created, in fact, an integrated service model for the music documents research, consultation, and access, with the opportunity to navigate from the bibliographical record, to its digital image, and to the audio document through network distibution of sounds and images.

On the basis of these remarks, the Guide Committee decided to integrate and enhance the ADMV project experience, and under this view, become Digital Music Archive (ADM) instead of ADMV, funding a digitisation project of 57.000 music manuscripts pages.

ICCU, as project coordinator, launched a call for tender at European level on: “Italian libraries music collection manuscripts’ digitisation” collected in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venezia, the Biblioteca  Nazionale Universitaria in Torino, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Roma, and in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, in which are foreseen:

  • manuscripts optical scanning, in each library’s seat;
  • images indexing;
  • implementation of electronic metadata archives on each library server accessed by internet protocols.

For the call a technical tender has been elaborated and used as a model for other under development initiatives in the Palatino Library in Parma (DI.MU.SE. project) and in the National Academy of S.Cecilia.

The call was awarded by the enterprises group constituted by SELFIN Corporate SOFTEAM ware corporate.