University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA Library)

The University of California and its partner, Indiana University, will develop tools and services to meet the needs of both data providers (libraries, museums, historical societies, and other curators of sheet music collections) and users of sheet music (musicologists, performers, cultural and art historians, etc.) as identified from a needs analysis that was funded by a 2007 planning grant from the IMLS National Leadership Grant program. Tools and services developed in the project will enable institutions with limited technical knowledge to participate in the metadata aggregation service of the Sheet Music Consortium (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/) and will provide users with a richer set of services, including the ability to contribute structured metadata to the collection, write annotations, and link to related materials of interest across consortium collections. In addition, cataloging guidelines and tools will be developed to support and encourage standardized descriptive practices and facilitate merging and downloading of metadata records from the consortium’s Web site.