Library catalogue records as a research resource : introducing 'A Big Data History of Music'
Name
Tuppen_Rose_Drosopoulou_Library_Catalogue_Records_as_a_research_resource_.pdf
Description
visibility:open
Size
536.03 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
BGr+/CcTAKU=
Resource type
Journal article
Date published
April 4, 2016
Abstract
Librarians and archivists are increasingly collecting and working with large quantities of digital data. In science, business, and now the humanities, the production and analysis of vast amounts of data (so-called ‘big data research’) have become fundamental activities. This article introduces the project A Big Data History of Music, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Library. The project has made the British Library’s catalogue records for printed and manuscript music available as open data, and has explored how the analysis and visualisation of huge numbers of bibliographic records can open new perspectives for researchers into music history. In addition to the British Library data (over a million records), the project drew on a further million bibliographic descriptions from RISM, which have also recently been released as open data. To show the challenges posed by the heterogeneous nature of the data, the article outlines the different structures of the various catalogue records used in the project, and summarises how the British Library data was cleaned and enhanced prior to its public release. Examples are given of how music-bibliographical data can be analysed and visualised, and how scholars and citizen scientists can engage with this data through hackathons, large-scale data analyses, and database construction. It is hoped this article will encourage other research libraries to consider making their catalogue records available as open data.
Project(s)
A Big Data History of Music
Funder
| Funder name | Awards |
Arts and Humanities Research Council | AH/L010046/1 |
Journal title
Fontes Artis Musicae
Volume
63
Issue
2
Publisher
A-R Editions
ISSN
0015-6191
eISSN
2471-156X
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright