MerMEIding to the future – A community driven sustainability approach for high quality metadata within digital musicology

• Applicant: Dr. Kristina Richts-Matthaei
• Subject Area: Musicology ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528785591

MerMEId (Metadata editor and Repository for MEI data) is an open-source metadata editor for creating and editing MEI files (i.e. XML files marked up according to the Music Encoding Initiative guidelines). Originally developed at the Danish Centre for Music Editing (DCM) at the Royal Library of Copenhagen and further developed by a small but very active community since 2019, the tool is well established for creating digital catalogues of composer’s respective works. Digital catalogues of the works of Carl Nielsen, Anton Bruckner, Giuseppe Tartini, Frederick Delius, and others have been created; other digital catalogues (including for Gustav Mahler, Franz Schubert, and Georg Philipp Telemann) are in progress. The project “MerMEIding to the Future” aims at comprehensive further development of MerMEId. Updates to the frontend (including expansion of search and filter functions, responsive redesign, and support for multilingualism), revisions in the backend (expansion of data import and export options, development of a plug-in architecture, support for different data structures, etc.), and quality assurance measures (standardized technical documentation and tests, particularly) will result in an easy-to-use, versatile tool for musicological research projects. The revised MerMEId should enable the creation of high-quality music-related metadata (on different levels such as works, sources and events) according to FAIR principles, thus making an important contribution to the data level of the discipline. Lastly, the project contributes to the differentiation of a subject-specific (musicology) profile for a Research Software Engineer. “MerMEIding to the Future” builds on the community’s work in recent years, supplements and enhances it with central and extensive development packages that require funding for their realization, and thus, in turn, creates the basis for continuous further development and maintenance. Particularly important in the conception of this project is the integration into specific networks: the MEI community, ZenMEM project partners, the musicological projects of the ADW Mainz, and the NFDI4Culture consortium.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants