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Music Scholarship Online (MuSO) is a digital hub for conducting music scholarship. Users can search and discover a variety of content relating to music, including archives and museum collections, digital journals and monographs, and born-digital resources. For instance, users can discover letters and scores written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart alongside journal articles and scholarly websites that evaluate those letters and scores.
MuSO is a member of the Advanced Research Consortium, which means that MuSO users can also discover relevant artistic, historical, and literary content alongside musical resources.
In the digital age, scholarship has begun to utilise the digital as a platform for sharing information rather than the printed page. As a member of ARC, MuSO is working to provide peer review for these resources, which we label as born-digital to distinguish this scholarship from printed articles and books that have been transformed into digital resources. MuSO and its collaborators are innovating peer review methodologies to ensure that born-digital music scholarship is reliable, adhering to standards of content and design while allowing for the flexibility afforded by digital interfaces.
In its latest stage of development, MuSO has made 18th-Century content from the Europeana Music Collection discoverable alongside the literary and historical content in the Advanced Research Consortium database. This work was possible thanks to a 2017 Europeana Research Grant, and in addition to adding the Europeana Music data to ARC, the grant allowed MuSO to generate an initial metadata schema for describing musical resources, which is available on our Metadata Standards page.
MuSO has teamed up with 18thConnect to make this content available through Collex and BigDIVA, the visualized search interface for ARC.