About MuSO

Music Scholarship Online (MuSO) is a community of scholars for digital scholarship in music. This community curates born-digital scholarship in music alongside other digitised resources within a single environment so that users can discover digital music content and conduct new musical research.

Curation involves conscious decisions on what content is included and what is excluded. MuSO is committed to the democratisation of research resources. It is therefore working to provide increased visibility for three types of scholarly content:

  1. Digitised archives and collections
  2. Digitised journals and monographs
  3. Born-digital scholarly resources

MuSO joins resources such as Europeana in its efforts to make digitised resources more discoverable by breaking down the arbitrary boundaries raised by institutional, corporate, and national interests. It is therefore working with these aggregators to ensure that valuable resources are widely searchable and discoverable outside their ownining institutions.

Printed content continues to be an integral part to scholarly enquiry. Scholars need to be able to discover content that was published 100 years ago in addition to that published yesterday. MuSO is working with the ARC community and its corporate partnerships to make both open access and copyright-protected content discoverable.

More and more, scholars are turning to digital platforms for conducting research and diseminating it. Because these digital platforms can differ significantly from more traditional printed formats, it is difficult to evaluate born-digital research. Curation of born-digital content requires a more transparent method of determining which content is included and which is excluded. MuSO is thereofore working with its partners in the ARC community and within the musical community to establish a method for evaluating born-digital music scholarship.

By providing all these resources alongside each other, MuSO facilites scholarly enquiry and encourages the forumulation of new research questions.

Brief Timeline

June 2015
MuSO receives a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA)
January 2016
MuSO holds a meeting at Texas A&M University with music scholars, librarians, and programmers to discuss issues of aggregation and peer review for digital content scholarship in music
May 2016
MuSO completes work on the start-up phase
December 2016
MuSO is awarded a Europeana Research Grant to generate its initial RDF schema by conducting a crosswalk between the Europeana Music Collection and ARC
June 2017
MuSO completes the crosswalk of the 18th-Century content from Europeana Music and makes it available through 18thConnect