A musical progression with greenstone: How music content analysis and linked data is helping redefine the boundaries to a music digital library

Despite the recasting of the web's technical capabilities through Web 2.0, conventional digital library software architectures-from which many of our leading Music Digital Libraries (MDLs) are formed-result in digital resources that are, surprisingly, disconnected from other online sources of information, and embody a "read-only" mindset. Leveraging from Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques and Linked Open Data (LOD), in this paper we demonstrate a new form of music digital library that encompasses management, discovery, delivery, and analysis of the musical content it contains. Utilizing open source tools such as Greenstone, audioDB, Meandre, and Apache Jena we present a series of transformations to a musical digital library sourced from audio files that steadily increases the level of support provided to the user for musicological study. While the seed for this work was motivated by better supporting musicologists in a digital library, the developed software architecture alters the boundaries to what is conventionally thought of as a digital library- and in doing so challenges core assumptions made in mainstream digital library software design.