Poster Session Recap: Creating a Search Portal for Sound Recordings

Here's a brief intro to the poster "Creating a Search Portal for Sound Recordings":

The development of digital collections and technology applications has revolutionized libraries, offering them new opportunities to disseminate metadata about their collections, such as sound recordings. However, as the number of digital sound recording collections increases, it becomes impractical for users to know about and search databases for these recordings at each holding institution. Metadata aggregations have attempted to mitigate these problems; for example, the Sheet Music Consortium has built a Web portal where several collections of sheet music in distributed locations can be accessed. The collaborative “Metadata Infrastructure for Sound Recordings” project was designed to conduct preliminary investigations into whether a similar portal could be developed for sound recordings.


Three digital repositories of sound recordings participated in the development of the project prototype: FolkwaysAlive! at the University of Alberta, Variations2 at Indiana University, and the digital archive of Handel LPs at McGill University.

Here's a pdf of the MLA 2008 poster and the accompanying handout.



Read a more in-depth report on this project, “Metadata Infrastructure for Sound Recordings,” which was presented at ISMIR 2007.



For more information, please contact Jenn Riley of Indiana University, or Ichiro Fujinaga, Joseph Hafner, or Brian McMillan of McGill University.