The Hathitrust Digital Library's Potential for Musicology Research
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Please do not remove this page The HathiTrust Digital Library’s potential for musicology research Downie, Stephen; Bhattacharyya, Sayan; Giannetti, Francesca; et.al. https://scholarship.libraries.rutgers.edu/discovery/delivery/01RUT_INST:ResearchRepository/12643385170004646?l#13643538430004646 Downie, S., Bhattacharyya, S., Giannetti, F., Dickson Koehl, E., & Organisciak, P. (2016). The HathiTrust Digital Library’s potential for musicology research. In International Journal on Digital Libraries. Rutgers University. https://doi.org/10.7282/t3-y1bk-wf87 This work is protected by copyright. You are free to use this resource, with proper attribution, for research and educational purposes. Other uses, such as reproduction or publication, may require the permission of the copyright holder. Downloaded On 2021/09/29 16:40:30 -0400 International Journal on Digital Libraries manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) The HathiTrust Digital Library’s Potential for Musicology Research J. Stephen Downie · Sayan Bhattacharyya · Francesca Giannetti · Eleanor Dickson · Peter Organisciak Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is 1 Introduction one of the largest digital libraries in the world, contain- ing over fourteen million volumes from the collections A comprehensive digital library for musicology would of major academic and research libraries. In this pa- ideally include all of the formats and sources typically per, we discuss the HTDL’s potential for musicology used by musicologists: text sources; printed music, in- research by providing a bibliometric analysis of the col- cluding performance editions and scholarly collected lection as a whole, and of the music materials in par- works; scores, ranging from full scores and vocal scores ticular. A series of case studies illustrates the kinds of to individual parts; and audio recordings of performances. musicological research that may be conducted using the It should allow text-based searching as well as search- HTDL. We highlight several opportunities for improve- ing by note values, and, ideally, it should even sup- ment, and discuss promising future directions for new port searching by pitch, that is, “query by humming.” knowledge creation through the processing and analy- While digitization of cultural heritage materials, includ- sis of large amounts of retrospective data. The HTDL ing music, has led to a proliferation of library, archives, presents significant new opportunities to the study of and museum content available online, no such ideal dig- music that will continue to expand as data, metadata ital library for musicology yet exists. Current digital and collection enhancements are introduced. collections for musicology are often built around an in- dividual composer,1 genre, repertory, or format,2 or on the basis of a specific characteristic, such as the location Keywords musicology · distant reading · digital where the materials were published.3 In this paper, we humanities · digital libraries discuss the potential for musicology research of a large- scale, general-purpose digital library, the HathiTrust J. Stephen Downie Digital Library (HTDL). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign At over 14 million volumes, the HTDL is one of E-mail: [email protected] the largest digital libraries in the world (York, 2012). Sayan Bhattacharyya We describe the history, coverage, and features of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities HTDL collection. We then explore the HTDL as a re- University of Pennsylvania E-mail: [email protected] 1 E.g., the Bach digital database portal, designed to Francesca Giannetti provide Bach researchers with “solid information on the Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey works of Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers from E-mail: [email protected] the Bach family and their whereabouts,” http://www.bach- Eleanor Dickson digital.de/content/infos.xml. 2 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign E.g., Alexander Street’s Classical Scores Library, E-mail: [email protected] http://alexanderstreet.com/products/classical-scores- library-package. Peter Organisciak 3 E.g., a virtual library of nineteenth century Califor- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign nia sheet music (from between the years 1852 and 1900), E-mail: [email protected] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~mkduggan/neh.html. 2 J. Stephen Downie et al. source for musicologists through a bibliometric anal- 2.2 HTDL Functionality ysis of the music-related material in the HTDL and its characteristics, including its languages, genres and The HTDL interface allows users to search both the formats, and its chronological characteristics,. We il- bibliographic metadata and the full text of volumes in lustrate several case studies showing how the HTDL the repository in order to discover items. In the case could be used to study music and music history, and of volumes that are restricted from the user’s view due we present challenges and opportunities for domain- to copyright or privacy concerns, the user can see a specific research using an unspecialized repository such list of pages on which their search term was found, but as the HathiTrust’s. We conclude with recommenda- the page images and full-text OCR are not displayed. tions regarding how to develop the HTDL into an even In the case of volumes that are not restricted and are more useful resource for musicology research. open to the user’s “full view,” both the scanned page images and the OCRed text are available for reading. This functionality allows users to contextualize their search results and enables researchers to quickly dis- 2 The HathiTrust Digital Library cover how a particular search term is being used in a work. It can assist a user in disambiguating between 2.1 Overview variant meanings of a word or phrase and in determin- ing if the volume is actually of interest to the user. Ad- The HathiTrust is a “partnership of major research in- ditionally, the possibility of search within the OCRed stitutions and libraries working to ensure that the cul- full text in the HTDL redresses, to some extent, the tural record is preserved and accessible long into the notorious difficulty of locating individual works within future.”4 The HathiTrust Digital Library consists of collected editions — a task that ordinarily requires the digitized volumes contributed by partner libraries, as use of additional reference tools, such as bibliographies opposed to being built around a particular physical and thematic catalogs. library’s collection. The HathiTrust has roots in the The user is able to view, for restricted as well as Google Books initiative, begun in 2004, which aimed unrestricted volumes, an abbreviated MARC catalog to digitize all the books in the world. In 2008, the uni- record for the item. Although the catalog record dis- versities in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (formerly play in the HTDL interface does not show all the fields the Committee on Institutional Collaboration) and the of the MARC record (notes fields, for example, are not University of California system, all of them partners in shown), researchers can request custom datasets from Google Books, formed the HathiTrust as a not-for-profit the HathiTrust that include full metadata records, in- consortium. Since then, membership in the HathiTrust cluding the entire MARC record. Additionally, users has grown to over one hundred and ten partner institu- can formulate and facet their search queries in the HTDL tions that continue to deposit digitized materials into interface on information derived from the MARC bib- the repository. liographic metadata. As the MARC records from con- tributing institutions are processed and indexed by the As of August 2016, there are 14.68 million volumes HathiTrust, their content is associated with the search in the HTDL, comprising more than 4.9 billion indi- and display fields in the HTDL interface. For exam- vidual scanned pages (Table 1). For each scanned page ple, the metadata for the ‘Subject’ search facet in the image in the HTDL, there is an associated plain-text file HTDL interface is drawn from the contents of MARC generated from it via an Optical Character Recognition 6XX subject fields as well as other selected fields such (OCR) process, as well as, in some cases, page coordi- as the 043 (‘Geographic’) and 752 (‘Hierarchical Place nate OCR information. Each volume in the collection Name’) fields. is described by a Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) file that includes bibliographic meta- data derived from the MAchine Readable Cataloging 2.3 Copyright (MARC) record for the volume that is provided by the contributing partner institution. The HTDL collection Because the HTDL contains digitized material span- of metadata, images, and text consists of approximately ning over 500 years of publication up to the present 658 terabytes of information. The content of the collec- day, a portion of the library’s contents are restricted tion encompasses in-copyright material as well as ma- from public view by copyright law. The rules that sur- terial in the public domain. round legal dissemination of digitized library material complicate user access, especially for the international 4 See: http://hathitrust.org/about. audience. Nevertheless, the ability to perform full text The HathiTrust Digital Library’s Potential for Musicology Research 3 Table 1 Size of the HathiTrust Digital Library as of June 2016 Total Volumes 14,685,004 Titles 7,742,501 Pages 5,139,715,400 Disk Size