Digital heritage: Preserving and sharing Saskatchewan’s music.

The Canadian province of Saskatchewan, located just east of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, has a rich and fascinating musical history. In order to preserve and share Saskatchewan’s musical heritage the University of Saskatchewan has recently undertaken a collaborative project to digitally showcase its unique Saskatchewan Music Collection (SMC) housed at its Education Library in Saskatoon. The SMC features recordings and sheet music that have a Saskatchewan connection, i.e., composer, performer, or subject matter. It consists of mainly popular music, encompassing country, folk, ethnic, pop, rock, alternative, rap, among other genres, in addition to classical and jazz. This poster presentation will not only present Saskatchewan’s most comprehensive collection of multi-format music objects but will also bring to light a unique aspect of Canada’s musical heritage. In addition, the SMC poster presentation will provide a sneak preview of the University of Saskatchewan’s forthcoming digital showcase, an online exhibit that will display the remarkable musical lineage, popular culture, and social history of the province of Saskatchewan, including a large collection of popular, religious, Aboriginal, school and community group music. While many libraries and cultural organization are now undertaking projects to digitize local music collections, these often focus on digitized images (scores and sheet music) rather than sound. The SMC digitization project aims to reproduce the various multimedia elements of the physical collection, by way of streaming audio access to recordings, and high-quality digital images of liner notes, recording covers, labels and sheet music. When fully developed, users will be able to explore the collection remotely, through web and mobile devices, dramatically increasing access to the collection, which was once limited to in-library browsing and use. To provide multiple access points and encourage serendipitous discovery, the digital files have been fully integrated with Library’s Online Public Catalogue (OPAC) as well as the Library’s resource discovery system, USearch. Through this poster presentation, participants of the IAML 2012 conference will have the opportunity to experience streaming Saskatchewan music, interact with the digital collection and interface, and also learn about the challenges and achievements encountered during the conception and implementation of the SMC project