Poster Session Recap: Online College of Music Recordings at the University of North Texas

The College of Music at the University of North Texas (UNT) is among the largest music schools in the country and offers nearly 1,000 performances annually. Of these, archival recordings of doctoral, faculty, ensemble, and guest artist concerts have been archived from the early 1950s, on formats of reel-to-reel tape, PCM F1 Rotating Digital Audio Tape (R-DAT), compact disc, and (since 2006) digital files.

A project between the UNT Music Library and the libraries' Digital Projects Unit (DPU) has made the latter accessible online both on-campus and off- to members of the UNT community (password-protected at the university level) via a homegrown system, stored on a Capricorn PS3000 server.

Metadata is entered on a system based on the Keystone Digital Library (soon to be moved to a Django-based Python Web framework); the schema is locally-qualified Dublin Core system that the UNT Libraries have been using for several years, using PDFs of the concert programs and Library of Congress subject headings.

Here are 6 screen shots of our current metadata entry form:



To compare, here is a link to the public view of the same record.

The DPU is also digitizing the College of Music Program Books, allowing us to link recordings to programs in the future. Other prospective plans for the project include retroactively preserving and adding recordings on R-DAT and reel-to-reel tapes, including guest performances by Robert Gauldin (8.13.52), Maynard Ferguson (4.9.63), Stan Kenton (4.27.65), and John Cage (4.18.90), as well as the UNT Jazz Lecture Series and One O'Clock Lab Band recordings.

• Link to a condensed version of our poster
• Link to the College of Music Recordings
• Link to the UNT Music Library

Dr. Mark McKnight, Associate Head Music Librarian
Andrew Justice, Music Librarian for Audio and Digital Services
Katie Buehner, Graduate Library Assistant (poster/graphic design)