Digitisation / Cataloguing of non-textual objects: The Indexing and Digitization of Paper Rolls for Player Pianos from the Collection at the Deutsches Museum

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfgang M. Heckl
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2012 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 203459118

The Deutsches Museum holds a collection of approximately three thousand perforated paper rolls for player pianos dating from the period 1905-1935. The collection includes rolls for pianolas and reproducing pianos from a range of manufacturers, and includes original recordings by the composers Claude Débussy, Edvard Grieg, and Max Reger, and by renowned pianists Carl Reinecke, Artur Schnabel, Wilhelm Backhaus, and Vladimir Horovitz, thus representing an outstanding resource for historians of music in the early twentieth century.This project aims to develop a prototype index of this significant collection. It is conceived as a pilot project, in the course of which we will develop a standardised description and adequate presentation form for the collection of paper rolls. Our aim is to have a rigorously researched, innovative multimedia presentation on the internet, which will for the first time combine descriptive data, photographs, audio files and technical explanations. Moreover, the paper rolls will be catalogued and digitized, and the perforated readers will likewise be described. The data will be made available on the Deutsches Musuem website as open-access content, and integrated in the Virtual Library of Musicology (ViFa Musik). It will also be included in additional, supra-regional portals such as “Bibliotheken, Archive, Museen” (Libraries, Archives, Museums, BAM) and Europeana.The system will be easily expandable; the projected inventory will form the basis of an interregional documentation tool that can index the full scope of resources of this kind held at a range of different institutions.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)