Poster Session Recap: Vanderbilt University's Global Music Archive

Steven Nordstrom, Vanderbilt University

The Global Music Archive (www.globalmusicarchive.org) is a free multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. It is a freely-accessible public facility that promotes education in African and American traditional and popular music through its own activities and by supporting the activities of others. Founded in 2003 by Gregory Barz, Associate Professor of Musicology (Ethnomusicology) at Vanderbilt University, and by Dennis Clark, former director of the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library, the GMA recently launched its first database in a series of databases, the Digital Collection of East African Recordings (DCEAR), which currently consists of over 1,100 discrete musical performances recorded by East African ethnomusicologist Centurio Balikoowa.

The poster session highlighted the process of collection, description and organization, and digital delivery of ethnographic materials through the GMA thus far. The collaboration between Vanderbilt University and Balikoowa has been particularly interesting in regard to developing a working model for managing an organized effort of collecting music recordings, images, and metadata from half a world away. Part of the poster session also showcased the preservation and digital delivery of the materials through the collection’s online database.

The following documents were available at the poster session, and are available for download:

• An outline of the process of collecting, preserving, and sharing information in the GMA
• Global_Music_Archive_intro.pdf (53 kb)
  
• A copy of the license agreement signed by the artists before their work is recorded
• license_agreement_form.pdf (88 kb)
  
• A metadata form for describing sound recordings
• sound_recording_description_form.pdf (55 kb)
  
• A metadata form for describing images
• image_description_form.pdf (59 kb)
  
• A document with lists of controlled vocabulary terms for use with the metadata description forms
• controlled_vocab_lists.pdf (39 kb)