Turning Music Catalogues into Archives of Musical Scores – or Vice Versa: Music Archives and Catalogues Based on MEI XML

Traditionally, digital collections of musical metadata, i.e., information about musical works – such as library catalogues or thematic catalogues are based on relational databases. Digital archives of musical scores, on the other hand, usually consist of collections of files, each containing one work in some presentation format (primarily PDF). Both types of collections are technically easy to build, but they have a number of limitations in terms of long-term preservation, data exchange and data re-use, and flexibility. A text-based data structure sophisticated enough to contain both detailed metadata and fully-featured scores may be a way of overcoming some of these limitations and at the same time include catalogue data in the score and vice versa. The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) offers a framework for such an approach based on XML files. The article discusses pros and cons and illustrates some of the possible use cases.