Harmonia Mundi Project
Enhancing access to music collections at Oxford and Cambridge
A project of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge
Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Harmonia Mundi is a 14-month (2008 – 2009) pilot collaborative project of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. The project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to investigate the best way to provide online access to catalogue records for the printed music collections of the Bodleian and Cambridge University Library.
The combined collections of printed music in Oxford and Cambridge comprise one of the most valuable resources not only for music researchers and performers, but also, increasingly, for researchers in other fields (e.g. social historians). However, access to these rich resources by international researchers is limited because only a small proportion of these printed music collections appears in the online catalogues, and only very basic searches are possible via the existing finding aids, mainly card catalogues.
Since the 1780s the two institutions have received a large amount of identical printed music through Legal Deposit, and a shared cataloguing project could achieve efficiencies through workflow design that would not be possible if individual action were to be undertaken.
The pilot project team is completing a detailed analysis of the existing finding aids and the two collections themselves, to determine their relative strengths and map the points of overlap. They are also developing a harmonized cataloguing workflow, and testing this in a sample cataloguing project. The results of these investigations will be presented in a report to the Mellon Foundation, together with a recommendation of how best to achieve full disclosure on the web of resource discovery information related to the printed music collections held by both institutions.
Contact
| Project Manager: | Clare Jarvis Tel. +44 (0)1865 277062 Email: clare.jarvis@bodley.ox.ac.uk |
| Project Officers: | Tetyana Ursulova, Bodleian Library Michael Jones, Cambridge University Library |
