Music Library Receives Grant

Multiple versions of a work -- here a clarinet concerto by Carl Maria von Weber -- can be encoded in a single MEI file, from which one may extract a single version or a combination of versions.
By permission of Perry Roland and the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia.

The University of Virginia Library and the University of Paderborn are pleased to announce the receipt of a grant jointly funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V., DFG).

The $77,065 grant will support the development of a music notation data model and encoding scheme for music scholars, publishers, and performers. In addition to the common notation functions of traditional facsimile, critical and performance editions, the encoding scheme will provide for the capture of a composition's textual variants and their origins. Textual matter, very important to the understanding of a composition in its historical and cultural contexts, will also be accommodated.

The grant will support two workshops that will result in guidelines that can be widely used by libraries, museums, and individual scholars who engage in online research, teaching, and preservation of cultural objects. The international work group is made up of musicologists, specializing in notational styles from medieval to twenty-first century music, and technologists, with skills in music representation, schema design, optical music recognition, and software development.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) is the central, self-governing research funding organization that promotes research at universities and other publicly financed research institutions in Germany. The DFG serves all branches of science and the humanities by funding research projects and facilitating cooperation among researchers.

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.

Any views, finding, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
The expected completion date of the project is July 31st, 2010.

About the U.Va. Library
With 13 physical locations as well as the original Rotunda, the U.Va. Library contains more than five million books, 17 million manuscripts, rare books and archives, and rapidly-growing digital collections. The Library is a leader in developing collections, tools, and collaborations that foster scholarship at the University and worldwide. It is known in particular for its strength in American history and literature, as well as its innovation in digital technologies.

About the University of Paderborn
The University of Paderborn has a special focus on Computer Science, exemplified by its Heinz-Nixdorf Institute. Together with the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, the University conducts the Seminar for Musicology where, in 2004 and in cooperation with the Carl Maria von Weber Complete-Edition project, preliminary work was performed regarding digital critical editions of music. Its "Edirom" project (also DFG funded) has been developing platform-independent solutions for musical editions since 2006.