1The Variations and Variations2 Digital Music Library Projects at Indiana University

‘Variation ’ in music is A form founded on repetition, and as such an outgrowth of a fundamental musical and rhetorical principle, in which a discrete theme is repeated several or many times with various modifications... The roots of the word variatio in the adjective varius originally referred, in non-specialized antique usage, to an impression of mixed coloration in plants and animals... Thus from the very beginning we see foreshadowed the twofold musical meanings of variation as technique and as form. (Sisman, 2003) Variations, a digital library system for music in use at Indiana University, provides near-CD-quality access to more than 8000 sound recordings for students and faculty. Developed at Indiana University in the mid-1990s in part to serve as an alternative to ‘hard-copy ’ course reserves in the Library of the Indiana University School of Music, Variations is now heavily used for access to digitized versions of printed and recorded music whether for reserves, classroom, studio or private study use. In February 2003 some 75 classes in the School of Music had placed materials on reserve in Variations