IAML | Antal Dániel honlapja

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:00:00 +0200

Join us on 12 September 2025 at the House of Hungarian Music, Budapest for a hands-on workshop on how small labels, music libraries, and private collectors can connect their catalogues and archives to the new Open Music Europe / OpenMusE data sharing space.

We will show how the Slovak and Hungarian music data spaces — federated through the Open Music Observatory — make it easier to:

Share and repair metadata across archives, libraries, labels, and streaming platforms
Use identifiers (ISRC, ISWC, VIAF, etc.) to improve visibility and royalty distribution
Manage voluntary deposits and digital surrogates for private collections
Connect local catalogues to international platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Wikidata, MusicBrainz

Who should attend?

Independent and small labels seeking better visibility in digital distribution
Music libraries and archives aiming for cross-platform metadata integration
Private collectors interested in digitising and sharing their holdings responsibly

Why attend?

Learn how open-source tools like Wikibase make metadata sharing affordable and sustainable
Discover how services such as Unlabel help bring hidden catalogues into global circulation
Network with peers from Hungary, Slovakia, and beyond who face similar challenges

The event language is Hungarian, with support available in English. Further reading: A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei; Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

Practical details

📅 Date: Friday, 12 September 2025
📍 Location: House of Hungarian Music, Városliget, Budapest
🕑 Time: 10:00–16:00 (followed by informal networking)

Participation is free, but registration is required as places are limited. The language of the event is Hungarian. We appreciate if you write on the registration form a few sentences about what you collect, what type of collections you manage, and what is your primary interest.

👉 Register here (link to be added)

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:45:00 +0200

How can music library services be modernized to compete with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music Classical? How can we make it easy for music students, educators, amateurs, or professional musicians to find the sheet music of a piece that interests them? And how can schoolchildren explore the music of their town or region—with the help of local musicians, teachers, or librarians—given the limited financial resources of university and public libraries worldwide?

Our tools are open-source and free to test, and we are happy to support those interested in exploring them. We are also planning a meetup in Budapest at the end of August or beginning of September to discuss these ideas further with IAML Hungary members.

🇭🇺 Olvasd magyarul el ezt a bejegyzést - Hungarian version of this post.

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex, originally presented at the IAML 2025 Congress alongside librarian Anna Mester and Anna Žilková, head of IAML Slovakia. Their presentation and poster explored the legal, organizational, and information science aspects of the data-sharing infrastructure behind the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb). A year earlier, the Hungarian professional community encountered this work at the Networkshop 2024: Digital Transformation of Education, Research, and Public Collections conference, in the talk and paper titled A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei [Opportunities for Federating the Slovak Data Exchange Space in Hungary].

At the IAML Congress, we invited international partners to test, critique, and help develop a live demo service. Thanks to Salzburg’s geographical and cultural proximity, we were joined by many Hungarian colleagues.

The Reprex team is explaining our collaborative work to music metadata experts in Salzburg. Photo: Anna Žilková.

Our project’s ambitious goal is to make all music created within the territory of present-day Slovakia accessible through a semantic database. This includes a user-friendly graphical interface for individuals and API access for libraries and other institutions. The database connects known works and their variants, manuscript and published scores, and demo, archival, and commercial recordings. It also links composers and performers to secondary sources in libraries and archives that provide musicological context.

In Slovakia, we are integrating materials from the Music Fund, the Slovak Music Centre, and the SOZA database (sister organization to Artisjus). This enables us to substantially improve the data quality of public music library catalogues, which often lack detailed, work-level descriptions of scores. Metadata is frequently incomplete, outdated, or even incorrect. For example, a catalogue may refer to a composer’s “collected works” or “selected sonatas,” but rarely indicate which edition contains a particular sonata or movement a listener may have just encountered on a streaming playlist.

Our poster presented by Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Žilková (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 on IAML 2025. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Our Salzburg presentation explored key questions:

How does data governance work between private and public organizations—such as between a rights management society or streaming platform and a university or public library?
How can we reduce redundant workflows through data exchange?
How can deeper, semantically enriched search improve music library services?
What transferable insights from information and library science can help libraries, archives, museums, and private actors mutually improve their data?
The development of this system is supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, through the Open Music Europe project. Our aim is to offer a federated, decentralized alternative to the centralized but never built European Music Observatory model—one that builds on existing national, regional, and pan-European data systems in a networked way and leaves data ownership and control in place following the subsidiarity principle.

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

If you care about interoperability, cultural equity, and the future of library relevance in the streaming era—this is your moment to get involved.

Missed IAML2025?
👉 Presentation
👉 Poster
👉 Please contact us directly to try out our system.
👉 Blogpost about the wider context of our work, relevant for IAML, not only national chapters and invidivual members.

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Press `F` on your keyboard

Enter full screen mode: on your keyboard

Full screen: F or Overview: Esc
forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Wikimuseum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Press `F` on your keyboard

Enter full screen mode: on your keyboard

Full screen: F or Overview: Esc
forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

IAML | Antal Dániel honlapja

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Who should attend?

Why attend?

Practical details

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Slide Navigation

Press `F` on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

Wikimuseum

Slide Navigation

Press `F` on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

IAML | Antal Dániel honlapja

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Who should attend?

Why attend?

Practical details

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Slide Navigation

Press F on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

Wikimuseum

Slide Navigation

Press F on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

Press `F` on your keyboard

Press `F` on your keyboard