Musical Instrument Museums Online
Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) is a group project of europeana.eu with the aim of providing central access to digital information about musical instruments in European museums. The project provides the infrastructure to make images, descriptions, sound samples and videos for a variety of historical musical instruments available on the Internet. These include outstanding instruments such as violins from Antonio Stradivari's workshop , instruments from the inventor of the fortepiano or a synthesizer from the Swedish band ABBA . Many of these instruments have never been shown publicly before. Differentiated search functions make it possible to compare instruments of certain types, origins or manufacturers that are in different collections.
history
The two-year project was launched on September 1, 2009 in Florence and the objectives were presented to the participants of the International Association of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections ( CIMCIM , Comité International des Musées et Collections d'Instruments de Musique ) for the first time. A consortium with eleven leading European specialist museums and institutions from Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Sweden was founded, which decided to work closely together for at least five years. In August 2011, after a test phase, the first data package was put online. In these two years the project was co-financed by the eContentplus program of the European Commission and has since been supported by contributions from the participating institutions. A CIMCIM working group accompanies the future of the project.
organization
The project management is connected to the University of Edinburgh , the MIMO consortium consists of ten working groups from the following institutions:
- Brussels Musical Instrument Museum
- Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium
- Cité de la musique , Paris
- Ethnological Museum , National Museums in Berlin
- Germanisches Nationalmuseum , Nuremberg
- Museum for Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig
- Università degli Studi di Firenze
- The Stockholm Music Museum
- Horniman Museum , London
- University of Edinburgh
In 2011, other collections contributed their data.
strategy
The presented material is aimed at a wide range of users, with information that is useful not only for scholars (musicologists, organologists), but also for students, teachers, curators, musicians, instrument makers, freelance restorers, auctioneers, second-hand bookshops and the general web -User.
In order to draw the general public's attention to the project, a virtual exhibition on the topic of “Discover the world of musical instruments” was started in June 2011. This exhibition shows examples of different aspects under which musical instruments can be viewed - e.g. B. Design of musical instruments, rites and culture, instrument makers.
Database and infrastructure
As a result of the MIMO project, around 40% of the European and around 16% of the world holdings of musical instruments were recorded in public collections. Around 45,000 instruments are represented by photos, digital audio files and video clips. The data collected in this way can be accessed on the one hand via the europeana.eu portal and on the other hand via a separate database (MIMO-DB) with differentiated search options. The latter contains more detailed information, additional photos and other data sets (e.g. instruments destroyed in the war, of which no images exist). The data made available by the partners are collected centrally, enriched with the multilingual classification data, fed into the MIMO-DB and from there transferred to the Europeana. The XML format LIDO is used for data exchange .
As part of the project, several aids for researching and documenting musical instruments in collections were created that are still available for similar projects.
- Detailed guidelines for photographing musical instruments, for creating digital images, sound and video.
- A revised version of the Hornbostel-Sachs system for the classification of musical instruments , which has been expanded to include instrument types that have not been taken into account up to now - including in particular electronic musical instruments and the category of membranopipes in the actual wind instruments.
- A controlled list of around 4800 instrument makers represented, which contains their life and impact data, alternative spellings and references.
- A multilingual, hierarchically organized vocabulary for the classification of musical instruments on the basis of general language terms and for linking with the associated categories of the Hornbostel-Sachs classification.
languages
The MIMO project is basically multilingual. The languages represented (German, English, Italian, French, Dutch, Swedish) represent the countries of origin of the MIMO consortium members.