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Annotation of digital music notation documents: surveying needs for a generalised implementation

Abstract:
The ability to annotate music notation documents offers a powerful affordance to musicologists using digital libraries, and in the organisation and discovery of annotated sources within a music digital library. In this paper we first assess the current state of the art for annotating digital scores, then report on a survey conducted into existing uses and future needs elicited from the music library community. Analysing the survey results, we distinguish between extensions which might provide generalised annotation services for music notation software, versus application-specific interfaces and visualisations using such annotation services. Drawing upon the Web Annotation Data Model, we frame this distinction in terms of annotation targets and bodies, whereby specialist or customised bodies might utilise common shared mechanisms to address targets. We demonstrate the value of the latter by, for the first time, implementing support for annotation targets in the popular and widely used Verovio open source music engraving software, adding visual indications for enumerations and ranges encoded using the MEI <annot> element, and which can be manipulated in the resultant SVG image. We conclude that common mechanisms for specifying and implementing annotation targets are not only possible, but a practical and useful foundation for music digital library tools and infrastructure.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publisher copy:
10.1145/3748336.3748346

Authors

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Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Sub department:
Oxford e-Research Centre
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0002-1668-6540
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Engineering Science
Sub department:
Oxford e-Research Centre
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0003-4151-0499
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Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0002-9525-4331


More from this funder
Funder identifier:
https://ror.org/0505m1554
Grant:
AH/Z506278/1
AH/T01279X/1
AH/R004803/1
AH/Z506278/1
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Funder identifier:
https://ror.org/012mzw131
Grant:
RPG-2024-080


Publisher:
ACM
Host title:
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology
Pages:
81-89
Publication date:
2025-09-25
Acceptance date:
2025-06-27
Event title:
DLfM 2025: 12th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology
Event location:
Seoul, South Korea
Event website:
https://dlfm.web.ox.ac.uk/
Event start date:
2025-09-26
Event end date:
2025-09-26
DOI:
ISBN:
9798400720833


Language:
English
Keywords:
Pubs id:
2298874
Local pid:
pubs:2298874
Deposit date:
2025-10-09
ARK identifier:

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