Realising a Layered Digital Library: Exploration and Analysis of the Live Music Archive through Linked Data

Abstract

Building upon a collection with functionality for discovery and analysis has been described by Lynch as a 'layered' approach to digital libraries. Meanwhile, as digital corpora have grown in size, their analysis is necessarily supplemented by automated application of computational methods, which can create layers of information as intricate and complex as those within the content itself. is combination of layers -aggregating homogeneous collections, specialised analyses, and new observations -requires a exible approach to systems implementation which enables pathways through the layers via common points of understanding, while simultaneously accommodating the emergence of previously unforeseen layers.In this paper we follow a Linked Data approach to build a layered digital library based on content from the Internet Archive Live Music Archive. Starting from the recorded audio and basic information in the Archive, we rst deploy a layer of catalogue metadata which allows an initial -if imperfect -consolidation of performer, song, and venue information. A processing layer extracts audio features from the original recordings, work ow provenance, and summary feature metadata. A further analysis layer provides tools for the user to combine audio and feature data, discovered and reconciled using interlinked catalogue and feature metadata from layers below.Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the system through an investigation of 'key typicality' across performances.is highlights the need to incorporate robustness to inevitable 'imperfections' when undertaking scholarship within the digital library, be that from mislabelling, poor quality audio, or intrinsic limitations of computational methods. We do so not with the assumption that a 'perfect' version can be reached; but that a key bene t of a layered approach is to allow accurate representations of information to be discovered, combined, and investigated for informed interpretation.

Worksets Expand the Scholarly Utility of Digital Libraries

“…Realizing this objective enables inclusion of features produced by the computational analysis of workset items or tailored to domain-specific investigation of the items within a DL. In terms of [4], this illustrates the distinction between the 'collection layer' provided by the underlying DL(s), and the 'computational analysis' and 'exploratory analysis' layers realized through worksets.…”

“…In this context we draw a distinction between archives, which provide evidence for the existence of digital objects in support of an investigation or argument; and digital libraries (DL), where the digital objects and their intellectual content are collected studied, analyzed, and synthesized in support of a scholarly hypothesis. Worksets take this a step further, as an additional mechanism for creating and refining knowledge within a layered DL (as described in [4]), whereby the act of aggregation they facilitate is in of itself an intellectual product. In Section 2 we selectively describe three motivated objectives 1 , which serve as specific illustrations of where worksets move beyond traditional DL functionality.…”

Serendipity in context: Prioritised contextual browsing in large‐scale digital libraries

“…The creation of semantic layers of contextual metadata using Linked Data in DLs is subject to ongoing research (e.g., Fafalios, Holzmann, Kasturia, & Nejdl, 2017;Page, Bechhofer, Fazekas, Weigl, & Wilmering, 2017). RDF, a framework for the specification of Linked Data, associates contextual metadata with information entities by asserting {subject, predicate, ob-ject} triples to specify directed relationships (predicates) between an entity (subject) and associated entities (objects).…”

At the Nexus of Data and Collections

“…Within the WCSA+DC project, Linked Data is being used to harmonize data structures-"just enough"-to create coherent cross-corpora worksets orientated around scholars' information-seeking needs [2]. In addition to bibliographic metadata, domain-specific information is also utilised within the collection [3], and that derived from computational features [4].…”