Summary
DISMARC uncovers large amounts of under-exposed European cultural, scientific and scholarly music audio. Content providers – archives, broadcasters, museums, universities, research institutes, private collectors – will be able to open up their collections to the wider world. DISMARC will create a significant catalogue of original material while strengthening the pan-European archive infrastructure. The DISMARC contentcollection is drawn from invaluable, European-owned, culturally-significant, original music audio and music-related material from the early 20th century until today. More content will be contributed by archives joining in as DISMARC develops. Audio will be searchable, discoverable and, where the content owner provides access to audio, listenable. (Not all content owners make their audio available on-line yet, and this development will be encouraged and supported by DISMARC).
DISMARC offers a solution to a problem inherited from an earlier, analogue age. Thematic searching in Europe’s catalogues will need separate ‘visits’ to each archive separately. Archives have created data cataloguing systems which are not interoperable, broadcasters have never addressed the issue. DISMARC collects metadata from participating archives, maps it to a DISMARC protocol and stores it securely. By browsing this store, users will be able to search all participating archives simultaneously.
The DISMARC consortium members are major European broadcasters (RBB, YLE), universities (SOAS, HMTH) and archives (EMEM, ISPAN, SVA) who contribute their unique content. They are supported in preparing DISMARC by cultural knowledge disseminators (WOMEX), technology engineers (AIT) and educators (GME).
The demand for DISMARC comes from both content providers and content
users. The users are archives, broadcasters, content aggregators,
download platforms, educational publishers, general public, media,
performing artists, record companies, researchers, students, schoolchildren
and more.
