Serveur © IRCAM -
CENTRE POMPIDOU 1996-2005. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. All rights reserved. |
I would
like to thank the Italian Library Association and Mrs. Andrea Paoli, Stefania
Fabri and Palmira Barbini for having invited me to speak here before you.
The impact of digital technologies both for
storage and transmission (via computer networking) on traditional libraries
brings to the fore many apparent dichotomies:
·
Physical place vs. virtual
space
·
Preservation vs. circulation (or archives vs.
public collections)
·
Bibliographic records vs.
metadata
·
Knowledge vs. information
So-called “traditional” libraries used to have
only paper-based collections; even then, they were constituted of more than
“mere” books, to encompass other types of objects such as musical scores, maps,
or engravings, say. Through the centuries, they have developed rigorous – some
would say rigid – systems of classification, search and retrieval for these
real, physical objects, themselves based on paper. Both the objects and their
classification schemes were directly accessible by humans without any need for
technological means.
With the appearance of electromechanical means
of recording and production, libraries were faced with a multiplicity of media –
whence one of the uses of the term multimedia – used to document the process of
human creativity, recordings, movies, CD-ROMs, databases and hypermedia objects…
These, in turn, differ from books in several ways:
·
They
usually need some technological means of access – audio player, VCR,
computer;..
·
They
may be “somewhere else”, outside of the control (but not of reach, at least for
a time) of the library.
It is no surprise that libraries have
traditionally separated paper from other media. In some major libraries (I won’t
mention names, here) musical scores and the recordings of the same musical works
are to be found in separate departments, in different buildings. Yet, how
“natural” is it to listen to a score and read it at the same
time?
Another historical separation exists between
archival material – e.g., recordings of concerts, conferences and other events –
and “library” material, even though both may consist of almost identical
objects, such as the recording of a particular musical work, the only difference
being that the “archive” had not been made commercially
accessible.
It is then this major challenge that libraries
have to face: how to integrate this variety of objects, not only as a mere
juxtaposition in the same place, but also how to provide the intellectual
coherence and ease of access.
However, this is not really altogether new:
multidisciplinary environments have always had to face the juxtaposition of
different disciplines, systems of thought and modes of transmission and address
the necessity to provide a coherent intellectual view. In the remaining of the
talk I will address these issues, with the specific point of view of my
organization.
The Ircam Multimedia Library (term
which we use to translate the French word médiathèque) is indeed a case
in point. IRCAM[1]
is a not-for-profit organization, founded in the late 70s by composer and
conductor Pierre Boulez, as a multidisciplinary research institute dedicated to
contemporary music. Its personnel consists of composers, musicologists,
choreographers, performers (instrumentalists, dancers), researchers (computer
scientists, acousticians, specialists of perception, of digital signal
processing, sound engineers), lecturers and students (of composition,
musicology, computer music)… all with a unifying goal in mind – contemporary
music creation, from its varied, almost infinitely different, perspectives:
technology, science, art, philosophy, sociology... Ircam is associated with the
Pompidou Center, which is the French national center for arts and culture,
itself a multidisciplinary
institution in the artistic domain: painting, sculpture, cinema, music,
industrial art… This adds another dimension to the tensions I mentioned above,
which has an impact on the library of such institutions:
·
Tradition vs. modernism (or preservation vs.
creation)
The IRCAM Multimedia Library was created in the
mid 90s based on the (traditional) collections of the music library then in
existence at IRCAM, with the addition of different archives, collections and
technology. It is, at the same time, a specialized lending library and
documentation center for the personnel of the institution, and a library open to
the public. In addition, it provides such services as various international
mailing lists[2],
technology newswatch, collaboration in projects related to digital libraries and
metadata, as well as expertise and counseling in these and related
domains.
Its collections comprise the whole gamut of
media we mentioned:
·
Books,
paper and electronic periodicals and scores, in print or manuscript, of contemporary music
·
Archives of IRCAM concerts (recordings, program
notes)
·
Digitized scientific and musical publications
of IRCAM
·
Commercial recordings of contemporary
music
·
Documentary films on contemporary music and
dance
·
Databases on contemporary composers and their
works
·
CD-ROMs (an endangered species which will
probably become extinct in a while)
·
Multimedia objects (music analyses, score and
performance objects…)
·
Internet access
The major challenge was to provide a unified
view of these collections, together with a simple and reliable means of access
to the objects they contain. In order to do so, we followed a basic
principle:
·
All
objects are (born) equal
For instance, this means, in our
case, that the recording of a piece found in an Ircam archive “looks” the same
to the library patron as a commercially-available recording, both from the point
of view of search (catalog) and of retrieval (interface).
The design of adequate metadata for our
specialized, multimedia environment had to take into account the search
strategies we wanted to provide to our users. In the case of musical works,
several families of criteria can be proposed to the
patron:
·
Inherent to the piece (composer, title,
performers, places and dates, topic, dedication,etc.).
·
Related to the piece (scores, other like pieces
– by period, genre, style, composer, topic –, related articles – about the
piece, about the composer, about a performance…)
·
By
contents (instrumentation, genre, style, theme, motif, rhythm, citations,
lyrics…)
·
Audio
and psychoacoustical (e.g., timbre, mood, etc.)
·
Fuzzy
(“I heard yesterday a bebop-like piece sung by a man, which spoke
of…”)
Since the Multimedia Library emerged, as if it
were, from a library, the choice was made then to start with traditional
bibliographic means of reference – UNIMARC records, which are the product of a
long tradition of cataloguing and indexation. Yet, since we wanted to address
the above list of issues, we had to adapt our cataloguing strategy in various
ways – either extension (for instance, in order to catalog musical scores with
detailed instrumentation), use of alternate formats (for instance, for music
recordings, in order to show the structure of the piece, see figure 1), of
distinct databases (for instance, for biographical information on composers and
musicological documentation on their works), thereby satisfactorily answering
the first two concerns, and part of the third one. But while the interface (see
below) masks this variety of underlying mechanisms that had to be put in place,
this multiplicity and sometime redundancy
is a shortcoming of the technology in existence at the time when the
system was designed.
This is where the issue of bibliographic
records vs. metadata arises. While both intellectually address the same need –
describe intellectual production –, they emerge from radically different fields,
the former in order to describe physical objects and their localization in a
library, the latter in order to reference and access objects on the Internet.
This is why they currently differ (see the table below), but the inescapable
rapprochement between these two domains provide for mutual
influence.
From our point of view, there is a shortcoming
in both systems in that they still tend to address flat objects, be they
physical or electronic. We need to be able to reference higher-level and
hierarchical intellectual entities, and this is what the so-called FRBR[3]
and its extensions wish to address. Such models (see figure 2) are composed of
entities and relationships, and may express the whole gamut from the abstract
notion of work to that of a physical copy, e.g.:
·
[w] J.-S. Bach: Six suites for cello
solo
·
[e1]
Manuscript score copied by Anna-Magdalena Bach
·
[m1]
Facsimile publication by Bärenreiter
·
[e2]
Interpretation by Janos Starker (1963/5)
·
[m1]
Recorded on a 33rpm vinyl by Mercury (1965)
·
[m2]
Reedited CD by Mercury (1965)
·
[i1]
Copy on a shelf…
·
[e3]
Interpretation by Pablo Casals
It remains to be seen, however, if
they can also be used to describe the hierarchical contents of a work (acts,
scenes and movements in an opera, say) and how they relate to the corresponding
segmented parts of an item (tracks on a multi-volume CD,
say).
Another good reason to sit on one’s hands is
the fact that new standards, such as MPEG-7 or Dublin Core, are in evolution,
and have not produced yet reliable and long-lasting, stable collection of
metadata, as is the case for the various MARC systems. It is to be hoped they
will not produce hypertrophied “cataloguing” systems so complicated that they
won’t be of a real and practical use.
It is sometimes argued that in the face of
complex metadata, there is no need to catalog anymore, but merely obtain the
metadata elsewhere, or even just reference it, by means of an identification
code. While the idea seems appealing, there is a plethora of such codes and
systems[4],
with sometime overlapping domains and unclear relationship to the FRBR
model.
In the current situation, our short-term plans
are to extend our current library systems to include other metadata alongside
the UNIMARC records within the same software system, thereby sharing the
controls, indexes and thesauri, and allowing for the specific referencing of
radically different objects and concepts.
Indexation is another issue at stake in such a
multidisciplinary and specialized environment: the available mechanisms
(classification systems, thesauri, etc.), have a wider and shallower coverage
than the one we need. We have thus been led to develop our own specialized
classification schemes: for the musical genres (see figure 3), for the
monographies. They allow for much more precise searches of material in our
collections than would be provided by traditional systems.
From the inception of the project in 1995, two
key decisions were made as to the interface:
·
Every
“non-print object” (e.g., movie, sound archive, audio CD, etc.) had to be made
exclusively available by electronic means, with adequate protection against
illegal access and pilfering.
·
The Web (i.e., HTML) would be used
as the unified interface to all the digitally available material, on a single
terminal. This interface would use familiar representations (e.g., resembling
physical objects such as audio players, VRCs and the like), be simplified (all
“unnecessary” controls and menus are suppressed) and secured as
well.
As the consequence of the use of hypertext (and
hypermedia), the lack of a single, global, information system as mentioned above
is masked to the user. Every “object” is linked to other intellectually related
objects via hyperlinks (see figure 4, in which the bibliographic record is
linked to biographical records in a different database as well as to electronic
audio contents).
This, in turn, provides two major
benefits:
1.
The
ability to show different views and perspectives of the same underlying
collections.
In
this way, the reader can search either for all documents (of whichever form –
book, film, recording, etc.), or search in particular collections (say, online
articles). He can even use a three-dimensional interface (in virtual reality) to
browse the library shelves from outside the library.
We have also tried to
address the problem of providing clear paths in the “flat” world of the Web,
where everything is potentially within a click’s reach[5].
2.
The
capacity to produce documents which either use or reference other online
available material.
This is how online, innovative music
analyses (see figure 5) are realized by musicologists, as well as educational
tools based on contemporary music pieces (see figure 6) using synchronization of
score and performance, and inclusion of other material found in the online
archives.
The online availability of large
collections (of audio, of video, of text) provides a good laboratory for
research in techniques of automatic indexation of multimedia contents. Such work
is currently in progress in the Research and Development department of IRCAM,
mainly in conjunction with the development of MPEG-7 within several European
projects. As to the Multimedia Library, it takes an active role in the music
information retrieval series of symposia (as member of the organizing committee,
as hosting its mailing list) and to its related community of researchers and
librarians.
We have strong hopes that these activities will
contribute to address all the remaining issues which I mentioned above as to
providing adequate specialized search tools for the library
patrons.
[1] Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
[2] MUSIC-IR, for music information
retrieval; BIBLIOMUS, for music librarians, etc. See the Web page
http://www.ircam.fr/listes/ for more information.
[3] Functional Requirements for
Bibliographical Records, as laid out by IFLA (International Federation of
Library Associations and Institutions)
[4] DOI, ISAN, ISBN, ISMN, ISRC, ISSN, ISWC, UPC/EAN, URN; CDDB, IPI, WID, SCRI…
[5] See our article « Le site Web de la bibliothèque considéré comme un espace », in Bulletin des bibliothèques de France 2000 t. 45 n° 3, mai 2000 (available in the Web at http://catalogue.ircam.fr/articles/textes/Fingerhut00a/)
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Serveur © IRCAM-CGP, 1996-2003 - document
mis à jour le 20/06/1997 à 11h03m40s.