News
DIAMM Wins £189K AHRC Award
Almost all research relies on access to primary
source material, which depends in turn on the flexibility and power of the
search tools available. The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) at
Oxford University aims to provide the best possible access to
valuable, fragile, and rare documents for a worldwide community of users – from
scholars and performers to the general interested members of public. Since the
inception of the project in 1998, DIAMM has even been able to provide users
with access better than that which they could obtain by direct examination of
the original sources. High-quality digital images offer radically improved
opportunities for close and comparative manuscript study, and have facilitated
a level of detailed discovery by using magnification beyond that achievable
with the naked eye.
Thanks to the AHRC Award, the Music Faculty with the Bodleian Libraries and Bangor University will be able to make a range of improvements to DIAMM. Co-director and Principal Investigator Dr Elizabeth Eva Leach says: ‘The AHRC funding will be used to purchase a faster and better camera to provide more images for some of the more important of these missing sources, as well as to enhance, expand and update the source database so as to make DIAMM the premier resource for all those interested in medieval music culture.’
To the foundation image archive DIAMM’s website has
now added a rich metadata environment in which the manuscript images are
placed. In 2006, the original collection of some 368 manuscript sources
(approx. 7500 images) was accessed repeatedly by 412 registered users. By 2009,
the website had been transformed into a portal to detailed catalogue listings
for 3127 manuscript sources (many recently discovered, with their details
described only by DIAMM), and now provides access to nearly 15,000 images, with
over 2000 currently registered users and an average of over 7000 hits per day
to the website, many of those from repeat users. Dr Leach comments that 'this usage is despite the fact that we currently only
have images for 15% of the sources listed and that full searchability of the
sources and inventory information is not yet available.'
The DIAMM directors wish to keep DIAMM as a free resource and are thus implementing a sustainability plan that includes the production of full colour facsimiles of medieval music manuscripts. The most recent can be found here and include the The Dow Partbooks from Christ Church Library.