The New York Public Library
Archiving Performing Arts Electronic Resources:


A Planning Project

 

Report to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program

 

July 31, 2002



Contents

  • Summary
  • Introduction
  • Major issues under investigation
  • Project staffing, methodology, and scope of activities
  • Content development
  • Identifying and prioritizing content
  • Publishers' roles in an archive
  • Implementation planning
  • Ingest
  • Retention and storage
  • Economic models and sustainability
  • Implementation decisions
  • Appendix A. Project financial report (omitted)
  • Appendix B. Performing arts electronic resources
  • Appendix C. Dance electronic resources


Summary

Through The New York Public Library's participation in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program, the Library was able to conduct a detailed investigation into the issues related to establishing a secure repository for archived electronic resources in the performing arts.

The project gave the Library the opportunity to gain a thorough knowledge of the landscape of electronic publishing in music, theater, dance, and film, and it also allowed the Library to investigate the special issues that must be addressed when planning for the long-term preservation of information in electronic format. Electronic content that has been the focus of archival studies and archival projects — including work by other libraries participating in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program — has mainly consisted of lengthy, highly structured and professionally produced journal runs that are the product of major publishers, most typically in scientific, technical, and medical fields. Among electronic resources in the performing arts, however, few examples can be found that fit this profile. Instead, these resources are most typically produced by publishers — individuals or small groups of like-minded people — with few financial resources who produce only a single title as a labor of love. Consequently, the Library took a broad view of the term “electronic journal” for its project, although it concentrated on resources that were “journal-like” — resources that are produced in a serial fashion, containing content of interest to sophisticated research by professionals and scholars.

Among the project's substantial contributions was the identification of a large number of such resources currently available — which will be of special interest to the field of the performing arts — and the results of a survey of e-publishers' responses to issues regarding electronic preservation issues. Another major contribution will be of interest both in and outside the field: the results of the Library's investigations into methods for gathering electronic content in a systematic fashion with the purpose of building and maintaining the archive. Here, the issues raised will be of interest to librarians, publishers, and others concerned with preserving electronic information that is off the beaten path — created without the backing of major publishers or academic institutions — information that is produced outside of traditional major channels of publication and distribution, the new “gray literature.”

Ultimately, the Library decided not to submit a second-stage implementation proposal to the Mellon Foundation, although the Library will continue to explore some more limited preservation efforts within the framework of a collaborative project led by Stanford University. The following report gives detail on the project's analysis of the landscape of performing arts electronic resources, work on content development and implementation planning, and the strategic thinking that went into the decision not to proceed at this time with an implementation effort that builds directly on the results of the planning project reported on here.


Introduction

Research libraries are concerned to a great degree with preservation. Today, this concern extends not only to the preservation of the manuscripts, books, periodicals, films, recordings, and other materials that line their shelves, but also to preservation of their intellectual content. For an archival manuscript, for example, both the text and the artifact itself are valuable research resources. Historically, library preservation has extended to the physical conservation of archival collections, the preservation of topical information such as newspapers and journals in the form of microfilm and microfiche, and the protection of degradable materials through appropriate environmental controls. However, the increasing production of information in electronic form has opened up new avenues of exploration in the area of archival preservation. Major research institutions such as The New York Public Library, as well as the electronic publishers themselves, now face the added challenge of ensuring that electronic scholarly journals and publications collected by libraries will be accessible to future generations of readers and scholars.

To this end, The New York Public Library, in response to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's invitation for participation in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program, undertook a planning project that focused on archiving electronic journals in the performing arts to address the long-term preservation of these materials.

The New York Public Library has, from its very beginnings, placed a high priority on safeguarding all its collections for the future, establishing one of the first preservation programs in a research library. Today, the Library hosts one of the nation's largest such programs and works actively together with other leading institutions on addressing important issues related to the preservation of library materials.

The Library has also shown strong leadership in the application of digital technology, through a highly sophisticated Digital Library Program now in development that will make hundreds of thousands of materials from its research collections available on the Internet. As part of this program, the Library has given special attention to the establishment of systems, policies, and procedures for archiving information in electronic form.

The choice to focus on the domain of performing arts was made for two very sound reasons:

First, the Foundation's invitation to participate in the Electronic Journal Archiving Program caused the Library to think in new ways about future readership of scholarly electronic materials in subject collections that are special strengths for the Library, such as the dance, music and recorded sound collections at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This facility serves a broad constituency of hundreds of thousands of annual users — dancers, musicians, actors, playwrights, conductors, choreographers, stage directors, critics, historians, teachers, students, and people from all walks of life — and has become an unparalleled resource for information in the performing arts. While many research libraries have overlapping electronic collections, especially in the realm of science, technology, and medicine, and a reader is able to access information from a variety of services, the Library for the Performing Arts is focused on providing subject-specific materials that are not widely collected or widely available through a single resource.

Second, the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program emphasized not only “the issues relating to electronic scholarly journals” but also “the likely loss to future generations of scholars of material published uniquely in the electronic medium.” For the librarians, archivists, and curators who grapple daily with the challenge of format diversity in written, printed, and recorded materials, the Foundation's focus on the electronic medium resonated with concerns about the preservation of non-print materials, which make up a major portion of the collections in the performing arts, as well as issues regarding electronically rendered versions of print materials. More importantly, the Foundation's project spoke to the developing concern, especially in performing arts studies, about the preservation of publications found only in electronic format, which are at significant risk.

Performing arts studies actually offer a relatively small range of scholarly journals within the confines of the printed form, if one means by “scholarly” refereed journals issued by learned societies or through established publishers. What is starting to become more prevalent, however, is an interesting universe of material made available that takes advantage of the multimedia opportunities afforded by the World Wide Web — opportunities that have been very attractive both because they appeal to the sense of creativity of those involved in the performing arts and because of the relative ease with which publishing enterprises on the Web can be launched.

What can now be found on the Web in the performing arts ranges from very well-produced, highly structured and highly specialized magazines to informal tabloid fanzines, full of unedited commentaries, original compositions and performance reviews, some produced under the auspices of traditional publishers, and others produced independently. Rigor aside, all of this is of tremendous importance to scholars and researchers of the performing arts in assessing the impact of artists and the creative enterprise on the wider society. Not surprisingly, the Library for the Performing Arts has collected, and continues to collect, this sort of material very extensively, both in electronic form and in print.

Within the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program, The New York Public Library's focus on the performing arts provided a contrast to the projects of the other participants, which focused primarily on electronic journals in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. In its investigations, the Library determined that there were significant differences on many levels between e-journals in these fields and electronic resources in the performing arts.


Major issues under investigation

The major issues investigated in the project can be divided into two realms: content development and implementation planning for a new electronic archive.

The Library's first objective was to identify the publishers of electronic journals and related resources in the performing arts and prioritize them in terms of their research value. Building on earlier, preliminary work in preparation for the project and ongoing work to identify such resources by the staff of the Library for the Performing Arts, the Library was able to identify a significant number of performing arts titles. The Library also began investigating intellectual property issues and the development of formal agreements with electronic publishers to cover the respective rights and responsibilities of both parties in developing a digital archive. An investigation of the potential growth of the content of the archive was also undertaken.

Concurrently, the Library was able to investigate the wide range of technical issues, involving system design, source and method of content delivery, and hardware and software requirements in its implementation planning for the archive. Additionally, the Library considered potential organizational models and staffing requirements, access policies, and long-term funding options. The long-term viability of the archive was also considered by examining methodologies to validate the archival processes from a technical perspective and by exploring the means to assure user communities that electronic resources would be accessible and readable into the future.


Project staffing, methodology, and scope of activities

The Library appointed as the Project Officer and principal investigator Jennifer Krueger, who formerly served as Assistant Director for Electronic Resources at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. Ms. Krueger carried out her responsibilities beginning April 2001 and continuing through January 2002, and was assisted by Barbara Taranto, who, as The New York Public Library's Director of its Digital Library Program, provided general oversight of the project and who carried out the project's completion through June 2002 in addition to taking a leading role in investigating implementation planning for the archive. Ms. Taranto was appointed the Digital Library Program Director in February 2001, after previously serving as Systems Coordinator for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library. Prior to this, she worked as a systems specialist at Mount Sinai/NYU Health Center, which gave her extensive experience with medical informatics and the long-term preservation of diagnostic imaging. Subject expertise in dance, film, music, and theater was provided by the curatorial staff of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Additional input was provided by members of the Library's information technology staff and also by Dr. Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), who served as a consultant on this project.

Ms. Krueger, with the assistance of the others mentioned above, conducted extensive work in the area of content development. This included an analysis of the performing arts literature in electronic form, the identification of individual resources for consideration, recommendations for criteria for inclusion, investigation into intellectual property issues, and communication with publishers and legal counsel. Ms. Krueger also investigated work completed by other organizations regarding the establishment of digital archives in terms of content and implementing technology. (This included, for example, the minimum criteria established for digital archives by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF) [http://www.diglib.org/preserve/criteria.htm], and electronic archival implementation done by the European Union-funded Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB) [http://www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/].)

Ms. Taranto conducted further analysis of The investigation of the technological implementation of the archive. This included covered the establishment of the means of gathering the content (or, the “ingest” methodology), codifying the content so that it would be readily retrievable, setting storage and retention policies, and developing a delivery strategy. Ms. Taranto conducted a detailed investigation into electronic archive modeling and implementation done by other organizations, such as the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (http://www.ccsds.org/ RP9905/650x0r1.pdf) and other work sited in the section on Implementation, below. Ms. Taranto worked closely with other participants in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program regarding technical implementation issues. Both Ms. Krueger and Ms. Taranto conducted investigations into the financial requirements of supporting the implementation of the archive in terms of ongoing content and technology development. Both also worked closely with other participants in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program, including Stanford University and the other institutions working collaboratively on the implementation phase of the program in the LOCKSS[1] project.

In addition to support for Library staff assigned to the project, funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided support for Dr. Lynch and other consultants, as well as travel directly related to the project, including site visits to institutions involved in electronic archiving. In addition, the Foundation's support allowed for the purchase of a server that will be used for archiving electronic resources on dance in the collaborative LOCKSS project. A financial report on the project is included as Appendix A.


Content development

The vast majority of information found in electronic form on the performing arts does not take the shape of peer-reviewed publications and is not the output of scholarly associations or institutions. Instead, this information, for the most part, takes the f0rm of single publications produced by single publishers. The intellectual meat of these publications is not stored as marked-up text, indexed and retrievable through a content management system. Neither are there likely to be persistent style sheets, document type definitions (DTDs) or schemas for storing and rendering output. For these reasons the scope of The New York Public Library project was somewhat different than the scope of other projects in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program that were either publisher-based or subject-based, where the content was produced out of large publishing houses.

Although the Library did considerable preliminary work in advance of the project in preparing its original proposal to the Mellon Foundation, much less was known at that time about the characteristics of the electronic publishing base in the performing arts. (E-journals in science, technology, and medicine have been much more widely studied). The Library's survey of the landscape is a significant contribution of the project.

The scope of the research for the project was determined by the limitations, both financial and technical, of the publishers of performing arts content and their chosen venue of publication. Unlike the large houses such as Wiley and Elsevier, the domain of performing arts publishers is rather narrow. Electronic resources tend to be created, rendered, and stored in a single system — often involving a service provider that is not part of the publishing organization and may or may not share information about its digital architecture to subscribers of the service.

Consequently, a major part of the work plan for the project involved analysis of appropriate candidates for long-term archival commitments. It was anticipated at the outset that reaching agreements with these various publishers would be the most protracted piece of the work.


Identifying and prioritizing content

At the outset, it was clear that the audience that was aware of significant electronic resources in the performing arts was much narrower than the audience that is aware of scientific, technical and medical (STM) publications and other areas of academic and scholarly interest that enjoy a wide dissemination. Partly, this is due to the fact that, unlike more traditional scholarly publications in print and electronic form, performing arts publications are not routinely repackaged by aggregators or indexed in any commercially available resource. Consequently, these publications are known and promoted solely on the strength of their dedicated but limited readership and on the mixed professional/commercial content of the venue.[2] In fact, the commercial/professional mix of performing arts electronic resources is possibly the most salient feature of these publications. It affects every aspect of their creation, their delivery format and most importantly, their viability.

As mentioned above, the Library elected to use an expansive definition of term “electronic journal,” considering many intellectually significant resources in electronic form that do not fit the strict profile of e-journals in, for example, science, technology, or medicine. Still, the Library restricted its study to electronic resources that were “journal-like” — resources that are produced in a serial fashion, containing content that is of interest to serious research by professionals and scholars. Other significant electronic resources that are not “journal-like” such as collaborative performance Websites are very useful to sophisticated research. In fact, one of the Library's most highly prized resources is its Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, which has amassed a large collection of videotapes of significant professional theatrical productions, the only complete documentation of many important works extant, including major Broadway and other commercial productions. Archiving content found in Websites about these productions might be something the Library could consider for the future, but since these resources did not fall appropriately within the mission of the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program, they were not included as part of the project. Likewise, the Library did not include Webcasts featuring the work of performing artists.

The staff of The New York Public Library for the Library for the Performing Arts has, over the course of many years, developed its own highly prized indices of various resources in the field. As a result, with the growing use of the Internet as a means of quickly and easily publishing valuable resources, the Library for the Performing Arts began to provide links to external online resources on its public Website ( http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/online.html). The effect of this was two-fold: new and important information was made available to the public and new and important information was brought to the attention of the Library staff by their Web readership. Professionals, researchers, and publishers of serious performing arts journals solicited the Library's interest in the new venue. The Library began to investigate, evaluate, and ultimately propagate certain trusted publications in the performing arts community. This accumulated index of invaluable print and electronic publications is one of the richest resources of the Library for the Performing Arts. It represents years of research, study and consideration on the part of the Library's professional staff and its governing agencies. The various indices are available in toto in the various divisions of the Library; a subset of these are available on the Web. These seasoned lists formed an important starting point for the project.

A relational database was created for the project to log the entries and to record specific information about each of the publications. Site URL's were examined for “freshness,” and live sites were recorded and entered into the database. A brief description of the content was included in the database and special note was made regarding the number of pages deep into the site a visitor needed to go in order to get to the meat of the content. It is important to note that the substance of performing arts electronic resources can often be buried deep beneath layers of advertisements, job postings, auditions, professional service listings, etc. Finding the content was a significant part of the discovery process.

Once recorded, the entries were analyzed and sorted into three primary categories: sites that were content-light, sites with significant content that needed to be mined by readers, and sites where the content was transparent — that is, where the content could be readily uncovered, and not buried several layers deep within a Website. The first category was eliminated from further inquiry since, for the most part, the information was contemporary in nature, including vendor information, instruction, workshops, etc. and were only relevant for current use. Consequently, despite its usefulness to the current performing arts community, it held little appeal or use for future researchers and scholars.

The set of e-journals that formed the core of the content considered for the project reflected a variety of formats of presentation and organization of the content across the disciplines of dance, film, music, and theater. (The list of titles compiled and Web addresses are included in Appendix B.)

The publications under consideration were separable into four basic categories:

  • 1. Independents/Self Publishers/Web-only Publishers

Examples:
Consumable Online (http://www.westnet.com/consumable), published by Bob Gajarsky, Editor-In-Chief.
Ape Culture ( http://www.apeculture.com) published by Julie Wiskirchen and Mary Elizabeth Ladd.

  • 2. University and Scholarly Press

Examples:
TDR: The Drama Review ( http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_drama_review/), MIT Press.
The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music (JSCM), (http://www.rism.harvard.edu/jscm/v1/no1/sanford.html), published by The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, Harvard University.

  • 3. Commercial Publishers

Examples:
Backstage.com ( http://www.backstage.com/backstage/index.jsp, published by VNU eMedia, Inc.
Downbeat.com (http://www.downbeat.com), published by Maher Publications.

  • 4. International Publishers

Examples:
nmz news (http://www.nmz.de/index2.html) and Das Ist Taktlos (http://www.nmz.de/taktlos), produced by Neue Musikzeitung und Autoren, (Germany).
Dancing Times ( http://www.dancing-times.co.uk/), published by The Dancing Times Ltd (UK).


Inclusion criteria

Not every Web publication in the area of the performing arts may be appropriate for inclusion in an archive. The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), the set of organizational principles adopted in the project by the Library, requires that a statement of policy or, at the very least, a set of inclusion criteria be established in order for the archive to be built in any sustainable mode. Establishing a set of criteria based on this model is most often done by an advisory board consisting of scholars, professionals, representatives of arts organizations, and librarians from the user community. This mechanism serves double duty. It provides a solid network of individuals who help shape and review selection criteria and arbitrate on issues when necessary. It also guarantees a level of “buy in” from the stakeholder community, an essential component of all large enterprises, and one that is sometimes undervalued.

To reach the stage of establishing a Review Board for the planned archive, the project team compiled a working list of titles for inclusion. This refined list was drawn from the original titles that were culled from the Library for Performing Arts' listings of online and paper resources. These resources fit the following criteria:

  • they were consistent with the current collection development policies of the Library,
  • they had identifiable publishers,
  • they consisted primarily of original content,
  • they were persistent in terms of publishing schedule and format, and
  • they were media rich.

Each of the electronic publications that were selected had to contain the first four of these qualities, and a strong emphasis was given to those that met the final criterion.

Although certain other criteria, such as a publication's importance in the field and its recognized authority or longevity, were desirable it was determined that including these criteria would rule out candidates that were not well-established, but were worthy of consideration nevertheless. This is not to say that these attributes counted against inclusion, but they were not considered necessary for inclusion. Some of the titles under consideration had ceased to publish on the Web or anywhere else, for that matter; the abiding interest in these publications was their obvious status of being at imminent risk of being lost for future research.

Consistency with the current collection development policies of the Library

The subject area of the performing arts was chosen as the focus of the project in part because of the collection strengths of the Library and in part because of the concentrated wealth of knowledge found among the professional staff at the Library for the Performing Arts. For the project, this staff drew from their expertise about the nature and long-term stewardship of collections and helped evaluate potential electronic resources with regard to the Library's collection development policy. By extension, the electronic archiving project was the natural and inevitable next step for the Library to make in its long-term strategy to conserve and preserve its materials, and it made sense that the content of the titles nominated were well within the bounds of the Library's current collection practices. The staff evaluated titles individually, and resources such as "Critical Musicology"  (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/CMJ/cmj.html), for example, which fell within the policy, were identified as candidates for preservation and subject to further evaluation, whereas Web publications such as "CDNOW: Allstar News" (http://www.cdnow.com/cgi-bin/mserver/pagename=/RP/ALLSTAR/main.html), which is primarily a commercial site with no content other than an inventory of products, were not considered further.

Identifiable publisher

One of the many challenges of dealing with small publications, and especially publications on the Web where the means of production can be entirely in the hands of a single operator, is the problem of identifying and locating the person, persons, or agencies responsible for it, an important matter in terms of intellectual property and rights aggregation for rights clearance. Simply finding a name, corporate or personal, claiming to be the publisher of a site is no guarantee that the agent identified has any legal standing in regard to its content. Many Web publications, and especially those in the performing arts, “crib” material from other sites, (see "beat thief," http://www.beatthief.com) or are complex sites that welcome un-vetted participation from their readership (see "oobr," “the off-off-Broadway review,” http://www.oobr.com/). It is not so much that the publisher does not control the content or disavows the content, but that the publisher may not know, at any given time, the nature of the content, or may not be completely responsible for — or capable of — content management.

The ad hoc practices and behaviors of some electronic resources in the performing arts may be their most salient and attractive feature, but the problems presented by these practices make it close to impossible to “collect” the titles for an archive in any meaningful way. While an agreement might be made with one party involved in the publication, another party may not be reachable or may object to the arrangement. In some cases, where a single agent can be identified, it might very well be that he or she has no clear right to publish the content. This is especially true of electronic resources that provide a substantial amount of streamed media, such as music or film clips. While the text of the site may be the intellectual property of the author/publisher, the media illustration is often not.

Primarily original content

It was considered essential that electronic content consist of original information generated by the publishing source and not information that was repacked from some other source. The legal ambiguities are considerable for re-published digital content generated somewhere other than its primary source which may take on a different format[3] because of bandwidth limitations and service provider restrictions, even if materials are “born digital” (see "Soundout," http://www.soundout.net). Print publishers, media companies, film studios, and others all have a stake in how evolving copyright legislation in an electronic environment is drawn and enacted. Until such legislation can address some important issues, what amounts to “buying or licensing” digital rights is unclear, at the very best, and risky, at its worst. Consequently, electronic resources that required extensive legal and monetary negotiations regarding intellectual property were not considered for the project.

Copyright issues are not necessarily insurmountable. However, work in obtaining legal rights to content in many performing arts electronic resources has the potential to turn into a legal quagmire. Even if the content is highly desirable, the cost of doing due diligence on the variety of conditions under which the content might be archived and delivered could far outweigh the benefit gained by preserving the material. Dealing with purveyors who have clear title to materials or at least could indemnify the Library from any liability where rights have not been cleared was considered absolutely necessary.

Publishing persistence

The initial list of performing arts titles consisted of a very wide range of e-publications including many that had substantial content but would generate, with more than occasional frequency, the disappointing message “unavailable.” To be fair this was more likely to be the fault of Internet service providers, rather than the publishers, and in the current economy service providers have been known to retire with little or no notice, leaving their customers in difficult straits. Still, publications that could not be accessed with some consistency were excluded from consideration.

Planning to archive any serially published materials is most readily done through the establishment of close relationships with the publishers of the content. There is obviously an extensive lead-time required to set up the legal and technical parameters for deposit, and some of the proposed sites failed to conform to any manageable or predictable schedule of publication.

Other publications in the course of a few months continuously re-invented their sites, changing basic organizational formats[4], changing intellectual direction, and changing the targeted audience. Still others discontinued publication (see "Inhaler," http://www.darkshadow.com.au/inhaler) even though it was clear from the “hit” counter that the site was still actively used. Overcoming the issues raised by dynamic content is a technical challenge that will be addressed later in this report, but in place of either persistent schedule or persistent intellectual format, the Library ruled out these publications for inclusion in the archive.

Media rich

The project's focus on the performing arts provided the potential to explore the issues raised by electronic publications with embedded multi-media objects. As noted, nearly all the titles under consideration contained some form of non-text material. The amount of audio-visual media included was significant, but lower than anticipated; 45% of the titles contained sound and/or video formats. Some publications, such as "African Music Archive" (http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/~ama) and "Ethnomusicology Research Digest" (http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/ReadingRoom/Newsletters/EthnoMusicology), had a wide range of content including archived audio, streamed audio, and music performance. "African Music Archive," however, offered its readership mime types and browser-compatible formats, while Ethnomusicology Research Digest relied on the ingenuity of its user base to download and then reformat binary objects into human “readable” files. The probability of successfully archiving standardized formats such as Real Media or QuickTime is much greater than that of archiving idiosyncratic media types. The ingenuity of the site publisher is manageable with human intervention, but daunting when planning an archive based on automated systems for ingest, storage, and retrieval.

The vast majority of e-publications containing media objects did not venture into unusual file types or file types unique to the performing arts, such as MIDI-based musical material, or computer-based dance notation which would represent specialized and complex preservation issues, or areas of uncharted technology involving “new media.” (Here, the term “new media” refers to new types of electronic formats, not new types of performance [see "Music by Light," http://www.itp.nyu.edu/nuweb/GALLERY/ music_light.html].) For certain types of performing arts sites that cannot be easily classified as e-journals or e-zines, there may be a potential audience for such new media, but for the purposes of the project these titles, or sites, were not considered for inclusion in the archive.[5]

Almost all of the titles that were under review included some form of non-text content. Approximately 85% of the electronic resources contained images and graphics beyond that which could be described as organizational logos or publication mastheads, and these resources clearly presented issues for concern regarding intellectual property rights. In the area of music and recorded sound, a further 45% of the listed titles contained various forms of audio media. Some of this content was available as MP3 files, some as QuickTime. Many sites that were considered, such as "Taktlos" (http://www.nmz.de/taktlos/index.shtml), provided numerous streaming excerpts from radio broadcasts, live performances, and discussions with musicians, composers and reviewers. Aside from the copyright issues involved — which may or may not be covered by formalized waivers given the legal standing of the publisher and the publisher's ability to clear the rights with all parties involved[6] — the technical challenges this presents were not insignificant. Streamed media, whether it is audio, video or Webcast, presents special considerations for archiving that have not been much explored. These formats, including Real Media files or QuickTime files, in fact constitute a third-, forth-, or sometimes even fifth-generation derivative of a digital source. In many cases, the digital source is itself a reformat of an analog recording. That aside, streamed media is not delivered as a “unit.” It is pieced out across the telecommunication pipeline in sizeable, downloadable chunks. Streamed media requires browser plug-ins and local transmission-speed configuration files in order to be rendered properly on the desktop. Unlike other binary objects that can be harvested directly and stored in an archive, streamed media published on the Web is not so much a digital object, as an event. It certainly can be reproduced locally, but it could not be easily harvested. In addition, some sites offer multiple streams of the same material at different levels of quality (where higher quality streams would be selected for recipient sites with higher bandwidth connections to the net), raising additional considerations.

Despite the challenges that media-rich resources present, it was felt necessary to give some priority to these resources in identifying potential content for the archive, specifically in order to address such challenges.

Further refining the subject focus

At a certain point in the project, as the number of potential electronic resources grew while, at the same time, cost projections for maintaining the archive were being developed, it appeared necessary to narrow the subject focus of the project if there was to be a hope of taking it to an implementation phase. The key strategic consideration used in narrowing the field was to emphasize congruence with existing programmatic commitments at the Library.

Of the titles that remained after the process of elimination based on the five criteria noted above, the majority of them fell into one of two areas: music and dance. The music titles were by far more electronically sophisticated than most of the dance journals, but several raised significant rights issues and the likelihood of coming to mutually agreeable terms for access with publishers and artists was not encouraging. Furthermore, the music resources, while more established and containing more content than some other publications, did not complement the subject emphasis of the specialized collections of the Music Division at the Library for the Performing Arts.

On the other hand, the 30-some dance titles that survived the initial cut were more in line with the goals the Library had set for itself at the onset of the project. The dance titles, which are listed in Appendix C, can be characterized in the following ways:

  • Journals were published both nationally and internationally;
  • Most types of dance and movement performance were represented;
  • Publications were split roughly between “born-digital” editions and “digital facsimiles” of hard copies;
  • Publishers were identifiable and locatable;
  • Media clips, both sound and vide, were found in many publications;
  • New content, for the most part, was still published as “issues”; and
  • Most publications were currently offering past issues that have been “archived” on their respective sites.

Another factor that was taken into consideration was the comparatively limited number of institutions and organizations focused specifically on dance research and scholarship — The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts being one of them. The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is highly respected both nationally and internationally and is considered to be one of the most reliable and rich repositories of materials on dance anywhere in the world. The Library is a founding member of the Dance Heritage Coalition and hosts the Coalition's Website (http://www.danceheritage.org). Given the leadership role the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division takes among dance libraries, it is quite likely that the Library might be the only organization that could consider taking on a major role in establishing an electronic archive for dance.

Considering this, the Library was in a good position to leverage some of its existing relationships in the dance community to help solicit participation and solidify commitments with publishers. Given this and the special nature of the dance e-publications, the Library made the decision to focus its efforts “narrow and deep” — providing strong depth of coverage in the very specific subject of dance.

By focusing on dance titles the Library believed it could accomplish significant understanding of the process involved in collecting, storing and delivering electronic content that was not already normalized in some other system. The challenges predicated by the diversity of document types, media types, and publishing genres were well represented by the dance titles selected.

While, in a perfect world, it would be best to be able to archive as much electronic content as possible, it was felt that developing an archive containing a modest number of electronic resources on dance would make a contribution to both the dance field and electronic archiving. The challenges for archiving this material are obviously quite different from the challenges of archiving large numbers of regularly generated text files from content management systems. But given the range of participants involved in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program, it appeared that certain issues of scale were going to be addressed by other parties, and the Library would make its most significant contribution by exploring areas not particularly relevant to the STM-type archive.


Publishers' roles in an archive

The success or failure of an archive depends in large part on the good will and cooperation received from the publishing community. For obvious reasons, the archive would be content-less without the publishers' material, but more importantly, without the good will of the parties involved, there are no grounds for negotiating or resolving issues as they arise.

This was a lesson learned and generously shared with the participants in the Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program by the team at PubMed Central, at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. While PubMed's experience was most obviously applicable to the Mellon program participants working in science, technology, and medicine, the experience was also applicable to the performing arts and other fields.

Dr. David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine, and his programming team shared the various technical challenges involved in ingesting material from a wide variety of scholarly publishers, many of whom are small, single-title entities like those found in the performing arts group. In some cases, months of negotiation were necessary between depositors and PubMed Central before an actual document was submitted to the archive. Most of this time was spent on the development of a DTD for ingest. Some time, however, was lost in trying to work with publishers that were less than enthusiastic, thinking that with enough technical and professional support from the National Library, the publishers would be more receptive to the requirements of the archive.

Dr. Lipman reported that after 18 months, working with a range of titles, they had come to the conclusion that the only viable arrangements were those where the publishers' involvement was entirely voluntary. Trying to win interest in the project could not be had by any technical incentive. And the possibility of providing a financial one was slim.

These lessons were valuable ones for The New York Public Library in dealing with publishers in the performing arts. It should be noted, however, that the PubMed project was operating in a very different milieu than the performing arts, where it is only a small exaggeration to say that publishers cannot even afford backup disks. Performing arts publishers are typically very aware of the need of preserving information, but any reluctance on their part to participate with regard to financial considerations must be cast in a very different light. Such publishers, it was found, were supportive of the development of an archive, and clearly saw the benefits in the possibility that the Library might be able to offer server space and the technological wherewithal to make an archive come about.

For many of the publishers of the electronic resources in dance[7] considered by the Library, the Web is the only publishing medium; no print copy exists. Approximately 80% of these e-journals and e-zines are currently providing their own online archive, subject to the terms of their Internet provider and the amount of space each can afford to maintain and expand upon with new content. (In some fields, as an attempt to underwrite this service, past issues, which are often indexed by issue date, may be searched by registered readers or by paying a fee to the publisher.)

Publisher-based archives are far from stable, however, as we have witnessed from the almost overnight disappearance of rather successful electronic publications such as "Friends of Photography" (http://www.friendsofphotography.org) and the original "Time Digital," (continued in a very different form as "On Magazine," http://www.onmagazine.com/on-mag/) among others.[8] Unlike some of their more broadly based cousins who might withstand the loss of an electronic presence, dance e-journals have neither the means nor the wherewithal to assure the public that the on-line archives will persist.

The short-lived nature of Web editions and the economic realities of producing art publications argue for some degree of receptiveness on the part of the individual publishers. Consequently, when the Library took a straw poll of e-publishers in February 2001, it was not entirely surprised by the positive response. A sample of twelve publishers was selected and each one felt that their audience would find the archive useful. All but one expressed interest in the development of an electronic archive; the lone dissenting publisher expressed concern, with little explanation, about losing advertisers due the establishment of the archive. Regarding the idea of making the archive freely available, eleven of the twelve responded positively and also felt it would be unnecessary to limit access for any period of time after publication. All but one of the publishers were willing to have content from their Websites harvested by the Library or other archive administrator, although only half were willing to provide files of Web content directly for storage. Seven of the twelve responded that they allowed their site to be crawled by such resources as Google or the Internet Archive; the others did not know or did not respond. On a question regarding storage, the publishers indicated that the file size of their individual publication issues ranged from seven to 100 megabytes. Ten of the twelve indicated that they planned to increase multimedia content, although a few noted that this might take years.

The illustration on the following page provides a matrix of possible relationships between publishers and The New York Public Library. The publishers' participation ranges from the most active — where the Library receives everything it wants, when it wants and how it wants, with no cost and with total control over delivery — to the publishers having no participation at all and the Library essentially adopting a “risk management” approach to archiving content. When publishers have no formal agreement and the content is freely available on the Web, it may be tempting to harvest sites until an objection is raised. And while this may not be ideal, it is perhaps the only way to handle some of the more elusive candidates.

However, this last arrangement seems to be the least tenable and the least desirable. It is somewhat akin to a collection development policy based on taking what you can get and not what you want.

Archive Publisher Relations

 

 

 

 

 

 

Type

Responsibilities of Publisher

Archival Record

Responsibilities of Archive

Ingest Method

Economic Relation

Active

 

 

Provide regular ingest packets in pre-specified format

Actively participates and desires archival record

Provide formal archive with data integrity assurances and continued support

Deposition

Some payment by publisher to archive if possible

 

 

 

 

 

 

Explicit

 

 

Provides ingest packets, unformatted

Actively participates and desires archival record

Reformat to meet archival standard

Deposition

Archive bears some cost

 

 

 

 

 

 

Implicit

 

 

Acknowledges the archive's right to harvest

May or may not desire archival record

Reformat to meet archival standard

Harvesting

Some payment by publisher to archive if possible

 

 

 

 

 

 

Null

 

 

No agreement between parties

Does not desire archival record

Create archive using materials without permission and remove if necessary

Harvesting without permission

Archive bears cost


In any event, whatever the relationship that is formed between the Library and the e-publishers, (and of course there will be easier negotiations with some and not with others) the terms of ingest for any given title will have to be determined rather specifically if the content is ever to make it to the archive. Trawling for content may sound like a simple solution (and even roguish), but it does not answer the bigger questions of what to do with it when it is brought home. Neither does it address the issues raised by content that includes streaming media, which cannot be readily harvested in this way.


Implementation planning

Shortly after initial work began that focused on the potential content of the electronic archive, the Library engaged in a separate parallel planning investigation on the archive's implementation, work that proceeded concurrent with the analysis of content, with the two processes informing each other along the way.

To implement a viable electronic archive there are three key components that must be in place (following the OAIS model): an ingest methodology, a storage and retention policy, and a delivery strategy. In addition, of course, systems and infrastructure components to make all of these operational will be needed.

The Library gave relatively little consideration to delivery issues, and these will not be discussed further, other than to note that it appears that many of the other STM-based planning projects were operating in an environment where the archive would, at least in the near term, be largely “dark.” Given what we learned from our discussions with publishers in the dance area, an archive of this material would be mostly “light” (fully accessible to the public) immediately; indeed, the archive at The New York Public Library might well be the only source for back issues of some dance publications, given how critical the lack of storage space is to the publishers, and how eager they are to shift responsibilities for archival backfiles elsewhere. Thus, the Library's project would have to fully address delivery issues as part of any initial implementation, not as a future follow-on to ingest and storage functions.


Ingest

The situation for ingest of performing arts publications is clearly radically different than that which applies to the STM publications that were the focus of many of the other Mellon planning projects. There is no hope of contracting for a well-structured Submission Information Package (SIP) which would be delivered from the publisher. The publishers don't have the technical capabilities or resources to do this, and their content is simply not created and managed in forms that are amenable to such a model.

In many ways, pure harvesting is probably the most practical model for ingesting content from performing arts publishers. However, there are numerous problems with this approach. It would be necessary to build a base of highly tailor-able, error-checking, adaptive harvesting software that could detect new materials, discard irrelevant content, potentially deal with streamed media components, navigate sites, and similar functions. While the Internet Archive and other groups such as the Research Libraries Group (RLG) have made a start on establishing such a technology base, it is far from ready for use in a closely quality-controlled digital archiving environment. There are also problems in modeling what is being harvested; one would like to collect incremental new content “units” (such as journal issues) rather than a succession of images of a Website, but many of the publisher Websites simply aren't organized in this fashion.

Ideally, the Library's hope going forward would be to use pure harvesting as a last resort, and to seek to negotiate some form of structured harvesting or publish/subscribe model with the sites being archived, where they stored new material in some organized way that made it easy for the Library to harvest or otherwise extract new materials.

Metadata is clearly another problem for the ingest strategy. A small amount of metadata can be created computationally — the site, file details, the date of capture, etc. — but most of the materials published in dance are not published with well-structured bibliographic or other descriptive metadata that could be incorporated into a Library- generated SIP from the publisher Website without extensive human intervention.


Retention and storage

Based on the examination of what was actually being done in electronic publications in dance and the performing arts more broadly, it was possible to establish a few preliminary strategies for retention and storage.

The digital images of what was captured would be kept permanently, available to at least support digital archeology as a failsafe against the limitations of format migrations.

The main strategy for avoiding technical obsolescence over time would be file format migration. The evidence was that there were a fairly small number of relatively mainstream file formats that comprised the vast majority of the dance materials. There seemed to be only minimal need to deal with specialized digital formats (e.g. MIDI, structured dance notation, etc.) which would call for specialized strategies. The preservation focus would be on content rather than on trying to retain “look and feel.”

The largest unresolved problem in the retention and storage area revolved around units of archiving; typically what would be dealt with would be complexes of files, somewhere between capturing a well-structured bundle of files and capturing a series of images of a Website with opaque structure, and dealing with this tension in both ingest and storage would be a critical problem going forward. The discipline of editions and units of publication are not very well followed in the dance and performing arts literature, and this creates an enormous problem when compared to the STM literature. This is an important finding from the Library's analysis. In the STM literature there is (at least to a first approximation, leaving aside details such as the listing of editorial boards and editorial policies) a well-established intellectual model of the objects being archived and these objects are clearly manifest in the process of producing an STM journal. In the performing arts publishing world, by contrast, no such consensus on base intellectual models of objects to be archived exists in a visible way within publishing practices. This represents a sizeable technical hurdle to be overcome. Another way of viewing this finding is that while the STM literature has closely emulated the practices of print journal publications in its transition to digital form, the performing arts digital literature is much less closely tied to such traditions. This creates a surprisingly serious problem in developing archival strategies.


Economic models and sustainability

The literature of the performing arts, as already discussed, is resource-starved. The only economic model that could be realistically devised would be a philanthropic partnership, where the Library might lead a consortium of interested institutions (perhaps building on existing organizational structures such as the Dance Heritage Coalition) that would work in close collaboration with the publishers to establish and maintain a lasting archive of publications in the field. This would be primarily a fully accessible archive that would be maintained as a public good. For a very small number of participating publications, it might be appropriate to use some form of “moving wall” archival policy for determining when material is made accessible (similar to that used in JSTOR), but the titles for which this would be applicable would be a small minority.


Implementation decisions

As the work on the planning project drew to a close, the Library had identified a relatively small core of electronic publications in dance for which the Library might mount or lead a digital preservation effort closely aligned with existing programs and priorities.

The economics of this potential program, however, were deeply problematic. An ingest system would require either very extensive software development which would be hard to reasonably amortize over the small number of serials involved, or, alternatively, a more limited software development effort supplemented with an extremely staff-intensive (and hence operationally costly) ingest system. There seemed to be little likelihood, at least in the immediate future, of being able to build upon other software development work in this area — the other Mellon planning projects, for example, were identifying development priorities that were very different from those that would be required for performing arts literature. A much more extensive ingest program covering many more sources would lower the per-journal ingest cost, but would mean a larger storage and retention effort, and a much more extensive and costly scale of negotiation with content producers.

In terms of storage and retention (and perhaps delivery), an archiving program for dance literature could share common infrastructure and systems with an institutional asset management and archiving system, since much of the work would be in managing and migrating a fairly small number of key file types. However, at the Library such an institutional system was not yet in place.

During the period of the Mellon planning project, the Library had been involved in an extensive organizational evaluation and planning process that had as its goal the transition of digital library efforts (collection selection, digitization, management, delivery and stewardship) from a project-based framework to a permanent, systematic, institutionally based operational framework. This would include the establishment of large-scale, sustainable infrastructure components which might be shared by a program to maintain “published” material in the performing arts (once ingest had been accomplished). However, it was clear that the Library was at least another year away from putting a fully developed, reliable, production infrastructure in place to support its own programs to manage internally generated content. There are also deep and complex organizational questions about where to position such functions within the Library's organizational units and how to fund the activities; the debates around these issues are ongoing, and challenging.

Since it was clear that digital preservation in the area of performing arts serials would be an ongoing investment (an expense) rather that a revenue-generating or even self-sustaining activity, it seemed clear to the Library's management that this was not the time to move forward on such a digital preservation program. Instead, the better strategy seemed to be to focus on developing institutional infrastructure, and then to return to the question of investing in programmatic extensions in the performing arts which encompassed digital preservation goals in a year or two, after the institutional infrastructure was established. Even at that time, however, it seems likely that only a larger-scale preservation program underwritten by a consortium is likely to be viable just focusing on the costs of establishing ingest systems. It is useful to note here that even if other Mellon archiving projects produce some type of community storage repository, the ingest problems for performing arts e-resources represent a formidable economic and technical barrier to exploiting such a community resource.

As an interim measure, the Library has chosen to participate in the LOCKSS program along with a number of other institutions. While this is not a full preservation solution, it allows the Library to gain some experience with highly distributed redundant storage as an infrastructure component, and also to continue to explore some of the ingest issues that will ultimately need to be addressed.



 

Appendices

Appendix A. Project financial report

[Omitted.]

Appendix B. Performing arts electronic resources

Performing arts in general

Al Jadid

http://www.aljadid.com/about.html

ArtsWire

http://www.artswire.org/

Australian Humanities Review

http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/

Entertainment Weekly's EW.com

http://www.ew.com/ew/

A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies

http://www.jendajournal.com/jenda/

Psyart Journal

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/

Shoot the Messenger: Christian Critical Review of Popular Culture

http://www.shootthemessenger.com.au/

The Hungarian Quarterly

http://www.net.hu/hungq/

West Africa Review

http://www.westafricareview.com/war/vol1.2/index1.2.htm

Dance

Backstage

http://www.backstage.com/backstage/index.jsp

the-ballet.com

http://www.the-ballet.com/

Ballet Alert

http://www.balletalert.com/

Ballet Tanz

http://www.ballet-tanz.de/

Ballet.co Magazine

http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazine/index.htm

Body/Space/Technology Online Journal

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/pfa/bstjournal/1nol2/journal1no2.htm

Boletin del Tango

http://home.snafu.de/tarlo/

Critical Dance

http://criticaldance.com/

Dance Magazine - Dance on the Web

http://www.dancemagazine.com/

Dance Online

http://www.danceonline.com/

Dance Spirit Magazine

http://dancespirit.com/

Dance Teacher Magazine

http://www.dance-teacher.com/

Dance View

http://www.danceview.org/index.html

DanceArt

http://www.danceart.com/

Dancer;s Delight [sic]

http://www.msu.edu/user/okumurak/

DanceSport UK

http://www.dancesport.uk.com/

Dancing Times

http://ourworld.compuserve.com:80/homepages/DANCING_TIMES

Dance Insider

http://www.danceinsider.com/

The Electric Ballerina

http://www.novia.net/~jlw/electric/electric.html

Israeli Folk Dance Connection

http://www.webspan.net/~hgpklm/

ISTD News

http://www.istd.org/news.html

The Letter of Dance

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/lod/

The Morris Ring Home Page

http://www.TheMorrisRing.org/

Newsletters of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance

http://www.folk.org/Newsletters99/newsletters.htm

Pointe Magazine

http://pointemagazine.com/

Rich Holmes's Morris Site

http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/morris/rich/index.html

Salsaweb

www.salsaweb.com

Shave The Donkey

www.thedonkey.org/

Shave The Donkey - on-line morris news

http://www.TheDonkey.org/

Sruti - India Carnatic Music, india dance & music magazine

http://www.sruti.com/

Star Dancers Ballet

http://www2a.biglobe.ne.jp/~ballet/SINDEX.html

tanznetz.de - das tanzmagazin im internet

http://www.tanznetz.de/koegler/koegler.phtml

Union London Dance

http://www.londondance.com

Voice Of Dance Home Page

http://www.voiceofdance.org/

Film

africa film tv

http://www.africafilmtv.com/

African Litereature and Cinema

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~aflitweb/

Fifty Years Of Film-Making In Zimbabwe (Kedmon Hungwe)

http://www.szs.net/kedmon-hungwe/film-making-in-zimbabwe.html

Film in Africa

http://www.szs.net/making-film-in-africa/

Filmkultura

http://www.filmkultura.iif.hu:8080/cont01.en.shtml

Kinema Homepage

http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/kinemahp.htm

New African Cinema: Cineaste

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/newafricancinema.html

Reviews and Reflections: Web site of Film Criticism

http://www.wpcmath.com/films/index.html

Senses of Cinema - an online film journal

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/

Sithengi (Southern African Film and Television Market)

http://www.sithengi.co.za/

The South African Film Site

http://www.safilm.org.za/

Urban Desires

http://desires.com/storyframe.html

Music

Addicted To Noise

http://www.addict.com/issues/6.06/html/hifi/

Africa-Iwalewa`s World Music Magazine

http://weltmusik.de/iwalewa/index.htm

African Music Archive

http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/~ama/

Afromix

http://www.afromix.org/index.en.html

Albanian Music & Art Zone

http://www.albmuzika.com/

allAfrica.com: Music - Top News

http://allafrica.com/music/

amadinda

http://www.amadinda.fsnet.co.uk/

Amazing Sounds

http://www.amazings.com/ingles.html

AOR Basement

http://www.aorbasement.com/

Ateliers d'ethnomusicologie

http://www.adem.ch/default1.htm

Australian Institute of Eastern Music

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dukewalk/newsl.htm

Buda Musique.com

http://www.budamusique.com/index.php3

beatthief

http://www.beatthief.com/

British Journal of Ethnomusicology

http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/I-M/mus/staff/js/BJE.html

CDNOW: allstar News

http://cdnow.com/cgbin/mserver/mb_from=rocktrop/pagename=/RP/ALLSTAR/main.htm

Collection of Articles on Music of the World

http://sunsite.kth.se/feastlib/mrf/yinyue/texts/articles.html

Cora Connection

http://www.coraconnection.com/

Cosmik Debris

http://www.cosmik.com/

Critical Musicology

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/CMJ/cmj.html

Croatian folk music

http://www.hr/darko/etf/et12.html

Cross Cultures

http://cross.ru/news/

Culture Kiosk

http://www.culturekiosque.com/

Current Musicology

http://music.columbia.edu/~curmus/

Decibels

http://www.netmusik.com/decibels/

Descarga.com: Home

http://www.descarga.com/cgi-bin/db/catalog?8J5Xpgwb;;343

dotmusic - All The Latest Music News

http://www.dotmusic.com/news/default.asp?dmlt=hm1

Electronic Musicological Review

http://www.cce.ufpr.br/~rem/remi.html

EOL Journal

http://research.umbc.edu/efhm/eol.html

Ethnomusicology Research Digest

http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/ReadingRoom/Newsletters/EthnoMusicology/

Exclaim! — Canada's Music Authority

http://www.exclaim.ca/common/display.php3?articleid=342

FZMw Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft

http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/fb09/muwi/FZMw.html

Gearhe@dEzine.

http://www.1800instruments.com/gearhead.htm

Gridface | techno music reviews and digital art

http://www.gridface.com/

 

Hans Brandeis Homepage

http://aedv.cs.tu-berlin.de/~brandeis/index.html

HardC.O.R.E.

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/HARDCORE/

Hitmakers Online

http://www.hitmakers.com/

ICRAM Forum

http://www.ircam.fr/forumnet/index-e.html

IUMA

http://www.iuma.com/

Jazz Guitar Online

http://www.jazzguitar.com/

JazzUSA

http://jazzusa.com/

Jelly Music Magazine

http://www.jellyroll.com/

Kulttuurivihkot

http://www.kulttuurivihkot.8m.com/

la SibE

http://www.sibetrans.com/sibe/la_sibe.htm

'LA'Ritmo.com - 'Latin American' Rhythm Magazine

http://www.laritmo.com/

Library African Music

http://archive.ilam.ru.ac.za/home.asp

M&A — Music and Anthropology

http://research.umbc.edu/eol/MA/index.htm

Marbles Ezine: Front Page

http://www.sgi.net/marbles/

Mbira.org - Shona mbira music of Zimbabwe

http://www.mbira.org/

MEMI - Elektronische Musik & Homerecording.

http://www.memi.com/

 

Mi2N - Music Industry News Network

http://www.mi2n.com/

Min-Ad Israel Studies in Musicology Online

http://www.biu.ac.il/hu/mu/ims/Min-ad/

Muse Magazine

http://www.musemagazine.com/

Museweek

http://www.stokstad.com/cyberspacecafe/museweek.html

Music by Light

http://www.itp.nyu.edu/nuweb/GALLERY/music_light.html

Music in Ghana

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/ghana/gh_music.html

Musical Traditions Home Page

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/

MusicAnd: International Site for Music Educational Innovation

http://www.multimania.com/musicand/index.html

Northern Journey Online Journal

http://www.northernjourney.com/cdnfolk/journal/njojcg.html

Notationmachine.com

http://www.notationmachine.com/tran-scribe/mailinglist.htm

NTAMA - Journal for African Music and Popular Culture

http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/

Organic AlterNETive Ano VII Número I

http://www.ufsm.br/alternet/

Orpheus - Classical Music Magazines

http://www.choirandorgan.com/choir.htm

Pop-Culture-Corn: Table of Contents

http://www.popculturecorn.com/toc.html

Production Weekly

http://www.productionweekly.com/

Progression Magazine

http://progressionmagazine.com/

Publications of the SEM

http://www.indiana.edu/~ethmusic/publications.html

ReSoundings: A World Wide Web Periodical

http://www.millersv.edu/~resound/

Rockbites alternative/indie rock music news

http://www.rockbites.com/

RollingStone.com

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/default.asp

RPM online- The Review of Popular Music

http://www.iaspm.net/rpm/

Russian Indie Music Page

http://gromco.com/music/rim_archive/

Side-Line

http://www.side-line.com/

Sonic.net News

http://www.sonicnet.com/news/

Soundout

http://www.soundout.net/

South African Journal of Musicology

http://www.und.ac.za/und/samus/

SRUTI-India Carnatic Music, india dance & music magazine

http://www.sruti.com/

STM-Online

http://www.musik.uu.se/ssm/stmonline/

TablaSite

http://chandrakantha.com/tablasite/

TamburaWeb

http://www.tamburaweb.com

 

Techno Online: News

http://www.techno.de/news/news.html

The Balkan Music Website of Muammer Ketencoglu

http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/3651/

The Hungarian Music Page

http://www2.4dcomm.com/sarvari/index.html

The Mbira Page

http://www.tiac.net/users/smurungu/home.html

The MIT Press - Computer Music Journal

http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/

The Music Magazine -- India's First and Finest Music e-zine

http://www.themusicmagazine.com/

The Music of Zimbabwe

http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/zimbabwe/music/zmusicov.html

The Pan Page - A Forum for the Steel Pan Instrument

http://www.musikmuseet.se/pan/

The Rebetika

http://www.forthnet.gr/rebetiko/rebetika.htm

themusic.com.au

http://www.themusic.com.au/im_m/index.html

Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie

http://sca.ahk.nl/tvm/tvm-e.html

Tradition Magazine

http://www.tradition-magazine.com/

Turkish Music & Voice Library

http://www.turkishmusic.org/index.html

Chaos Control Digizine!

http://www.chaoscontrol.com/index.html

Inhaler E-Zine

http://www.darkshadow.com.au/inhaler/

Theater

About Performance

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/Arts/departs/perform/Publications

Arena

http://www.siciliateatro.org/arena/

Comparative Drama

http://www.wmich.edu/compdr/index.html

Content

http://www.datum.org/12_CONTENT.html

CurtainUp

http://www.curtainup.com/

Drama online, The Journal of National Drama

http://www.dokumenta.co.uk/dramaonline.html

Dramatist Magazine

http://www.dramatistsguild.com/doc/drama.htm

Galatea

http://galatea.let.vu.nl/

George Coates Performance Works

http://www.georgecoates.org/

IndustryClick

http://industryclick.com/magazine.asp?magazineid=138&siteid=15

infoZine - Theatre Mirror

http://www.infozine.com/mirror/theatre/

JADT Journal of American Drama & Theater

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/MESTC/jadt.htm

Journal of Irish Theatre Forum

http://www.ucd.ie/~irthfrm/

Journal of Theater and Drama

http://research.haifa.ac.il/~theatre/jtd.html

London Theatre Guide Back Issues of Newsletters

http://www.londontheatre.co.uk/members/backissuesnewsletters.htm

OOBR ("The Off-Off-Broadway Review")

http://www.oobr.com/

 

PAJ - A Journal of Performance and Art

 

http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/journals/paj/paj.html

Péndulo WWW, Teatro

http://www.hypergraphia.com/pendulo/0teat.html

Performance Art Festival + Archives

http://www.performance-art.org/pages/index.cfm

PLASA Media - Lighting&Sound International

http://www.plasa.org/media/lsi/latest_issue.asp

Proptology: The Journal of Props Professionals

http://home.eol.ca/~props/

Publications and Theatre News

http://www.plattevilletheatre.org/pctpubd.htm

Revue Du Spectacle On-Line

http://wwwusers.imaginet.fr/~chauveau/somm.html

Scenography International

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/scenography/

Stage Directions Magazine

http://www.stage-directions.com/

The Eugene O'Neill Newsletter

http://www.eoneill.com/library/newsletter/index.htm

The Stage Theatre News Reviews and Auditions

http://www.thestage.co.uk/index.shtml

Theater Insight

http://www.utexas.edu/students/ti/issues.htm

Appendix C. Dance electronic resources

Arts Journal

http://www.artsjournal.com/

Backstage

http://www.backstagecasting.com/

Ballet 2000/Balletto Oggi

http://www.ballet2000.com/index.htm

Ballet Alert

http://www.balletalert.com/

Ballet Magazine (UK)

http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazine/index.htm

Ballet Tanz (German)

http://www.ballet-tanz.de/en/main.html

Ballroom Dancing Times

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/DANCING_TIMES

Body Space and Technology Journal

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/pfa/bstjournal

Cambodian Arts

http://research.umbc.edu/efhm/cambodia/index.htm

Criticaldance.com

http://www.criticaldance.com/

Culture Kiosque

http://www.culturekiosque.com/

Dance (Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing)

http://www.istd.org/dance/default.htm

Dance Advance

http://www.danceadvance.org/index2.html

Dance Europ

http://www.danceeurope.co.uk/

Dance Express (UK)

http://www.danceexpress.demon.co.uk/

Dance Insider

http://danceinsider.com/

Dance Magazine

http://www.dancemagazine.com/

Dance Online

http://www.danceonline.com/index.html

Dance Spirit Magazine

http://dancespirit.com/

Dance Sport UK

http://www.dancesport.uk.com/

Dance Teacher Magazine

http://www.dance-teacher.com/

Danceart

http://www.danceart.com/

Dancer's Delight

http://www.msu.edu/user/okumurak/

DanceView

http://www.danceview.org/

Danz (New Zealand)

http://www.danz.org.nz/

Kulttuurivihkot (Finnish)

http://www.kulttuurivihkot.8m.com/

Lancashire Folk

http://www.funforall.co.uk/lancashirefolk/Articles.htm

 

Newsletter of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance

 

http://www.folk.org/Newsletters99/newsletters.htm

Pointe Magazine

http://pointemagazine.com/

Revue du Spectacle

http://wwwusers.imaginet.fr/~chauveau/somm.html

Richard Holme's Morris site

http://web.syr.edu/~rsholmes/morris/rich/index.html

Scena Italiana

http://www.fionline.it/scena_italiana/index.html

Shave the Donkey

http://www.thedonkey.org/

Sruti Indian music and dance

http://www.sruti.com/

Star Dancers Ballet (Japanese)

http://www2a.biglobe.ne.jp/~ballet/star.html

TANZNETZ

http://www.tanznetz.de/

TANZOriental

http://www.tanzoriental.com/

The Israeli Folk Dance Connection

http://www.webspan.net/~hgpklm/

The Morris Ring The National Association of Men's Morris & Sword Dance Clubs

http://www.themorrisring.org/

The Stage

http://www.thestage.co.uk/index.shtml

Village Voice — Dance

http://www.villagevoice.com/dance/

Voice of Dance

http://www.voiceofdance.org/

Women and Performance

http://www.echonyc.com/~women/

 


Notes

[1] The LOCKSS project is developing a decentralized electronic archive, based on the fundamental principle that electronic files are more secure when multiple copies of these files are stored in several locations. Put another way, “lots of copies keeps stuff safe” — this is the basis of the LOCKSS acronym.

[2] Performing arts electronic resources are rarely a compilation of scholarly articles. Advertisements are often embedded in text and commercial interests openly sponsor some features. See http://www.actingbiz.com/

[3] MPEG becomes Real Media, TIFF files become GIF or JPEG files, etc.

[4] Format in this case means something different from style or layout or mime type, referring to whether the publication is a single author site, a cooperative site, an electronic forum, etc.

[5] It is important to note here that embedded media is in some ways no more challenging than any type of electronic content. Unusual or non-standard text formats present similar ingest issues. Archiving PDF documents or NB documents require ingest protocols and standardized classification schema in the same way media objects do. The difference here lies in the rather more complex delivery methods required for media, and consequently the more complex and detailed metadata that must be gathered at the time of ingest. It may be desirable to deliver text in the format and presentation style it was originally rendered; however, it may turn out to be of no intellectual consequence to the publication in question. On the other hand, media content must be rendered with some verisimilitude. The content in this case cannot be extracted from its form.

[6] The preferable solution is to require publishers to sign an indemnity waiver, stating that they hold the (digital) right to the images in question and that the archive will be held blameless should a dispute arise. Such a waiver may pose problems for publishers who have no knowledge of how early editions of the publication were created and publishers outside the United States for whom different legal obligations apply. In instances where the publisher does hold the right to an image, a place holder may have to be inserted, perhaps describing the image and providing information to locate the image elsewhere. Copyright and performance rights issues could occur with audio clips. The waiver mentioned above would need to cover all instances of intellectual property, including these. If rights issues cannot be satisfactorily negotiated with the publisher, recourse to the individual rights holders may prove to be to daunting due to the numerous individuals involved. For a title whose content otherwise is desirable to retain, place holders may be needed.

[7] Statistical sampling shows that perhaps as much as 70% of performing arts journals are only found in digital format. Another 10% include material in the electronic version that is never published on the paper issue. See for example: http://www.backstage.com/.

[8] Currently there are many e-journals facing imminent closure. See: http://www.artchive.com/artchive.