Book chapter, 2023
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Book chapter
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Conference poster, 2026
The need for new models of authorship and provenience in metadata
Through a few real-life and imagined scenarios, we want to focus on the questions of authorship and provenience in metadata for musical works. AI-assisted and mixed music, where the role of the machine can be hard to document, challenges classical model of authorship. Indigenous and traditional music, where oral tradition is often the norm and composers and authors can be unknown, also forces us to reconsider how works are catalogued. AI and algorithmic musicological analysis promises to enrich our metadata descriptions and make it possible to interlink objects in our collections. For the sake of accountability, it becomes important to document the provenience of these new automated analyses. These questions are of particular interest for The National Library of Norway, which aims at building a new infrastructure for its music collections, in order to unite the different types of material (printed and manuscript scores, archive recordings, and objects obtained via legal deposit) and make it available for research, as much as legally permitted. Designing a single ontology that will allow for rich and precise metadata across a wide range of musical genres and traditions is a challenging task. Document-based cataloguing practices can fail to fully capture relationships between objects, actors, and more abstract entities. FRBR entities of work/expression/manifestation are heavily influenced by the book-cataloguing practice and are not well suited for music outside of the western classical music canon. We hope to find a solution flexible enough to cover all scenarios, while remaining in line with international standards for interoperability.