by M. Nathalie Hristov, MLIS
Professor and Music Librarian
University of Tennessee

Kathryn A. Linton
Music Librarian for Instruction and Outreach
Vanderbilt University

Joshua Ortiz Baco
Assistant Professor and Digital Scholarship Librarian
University of Tennessee

1. Impetus for the Development of Emerging Digital Tools and Technology for Musicological Research and Pedagogy

Currently, traditional scholarly resources enable musicologists to trace the origins of numerous musical systems, styles, and instruments through the painstaking process of wading through physical volumes from several world regions to find commonalities. While there has been a significant rise in the digitization of music archives, the content represents only a small fraction of the vast collections of historical documents related to music in libraries across the globe.^[1] Furthermore, digital collections in music are stored differently among thousands of libraries with their own unique set of finding aids and organizational structure. Considering the limited amount and fragmented nature of digitized historical documents in music, the time-intensive process of extracting content from multiple sources poses challenges for researchers looking for connections between musicians and musical ideas. Thus, major discoveries in musicological research are few and far between when compared to those in other disciplines. In a variety of ways, music scholarship has lagged in terms of digitized resources and technological innovations. ^[2] Nevertheless, music scholars and digital humanists in the last couple of decades have begun exploring methods for moving musical research forward into the technological era with greater global access and emerging technologies.^[3]
Continue reading Musical Maps of the World in the 21st Century: Leveraging Librarian Expertise in the Development of Visualization Tools for Music Research and Pedagogy →