Music Australia
Music Australia is a free national online service hosted by the National Library of Australia in conjunction with over 50 cultural organisations across Australia. It was launched on 14 March 2005. It covers all types, styles and genres of Australian music, and showcases Australia’s musical culture across contemporary and historical periods, from the 19th century. Music Australia operates with a broad definition of 'Australian music', and covers music published in Australia or music composed or performed by Australians or about Australia or Australians. Music Australia provides a ‘virtual’ Australian national music collection, with metadata aggregated centrally by the National Library but access to the resources being through the holding institution.
Music Australia functions as a top-layer, federated discovery service to metadata with digital content created, archived and delivered by contributing organisations. It uses two linked databases, one for resources and one for people and organisation information. A search will find music and music-related resources physically scattered across Australia, where vast geographical distances, remote locations, dispersed collections and low level of community funding mitigates against easy access to music resources.
Items referenced include music scores, sound recordings, websites, pictures, films, multimedia, kits, objects, archival collections and other music-related material held in libraries, archives, museums, universities, and specialist music and research organisations in Australia.
The service contains information about Australian music, including books and theses, information created by Australians about non-Australian music, and biographical entries for Australian musicians, performers, composers, groups and ensembles, festivals and organisations.
Music Australia uses various permalinks to ensure permanent links and access to its resources. These permalinks can be used from any browser and do not require the Music Australia website to be open.
Developing and delivering the systems to make the service possible posed enormous challenges to music librarians and information professionals across Australia. When the first ideas for a service were floated in 2001, Australia’s music was scattered across many different institutions, libraries, archives, museums and arts and specialists music organisations, and there was no way for users or researchers to find and access them. There were no collections of digitised printed music and although some national institutions had been digitally preserving their sound collections, none were available online.
As part of the content generation the National Library developed a cooperative plan with the state libraries to digitize Australian sheet music within their emerging digitisation programs. Some state libraries, such as Queensland and Western Australia, also developed arts initiatives to perform and record hitherto unknown historic musical works pertaining to their regions, and others, such as the State Library of South Australia, commenced programs to digitally preserve and deliver sound recordings.
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