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

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0200

16:00–17:30 Our presentation takes place in the session of Music Libraries of Tomorrow: Reaching out to Wider Audiences at the Mozarteum University E.001 HS Thomas Bernhard room.

We want invite IAML members—national libraries, regional centres, municipal collections, and independent music librarians—to join us in building a federated, decentralised European Music Observatory. 👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Our presentation at IAML 2025 introduces the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb), a national pilot within Open Music Europe. It offers a pragmatic, scalable solution to a widespread challenge: aligning metadata from libraries, archives, rights organisations, and digital distributors without centralisation or heavy infrastructure.

Built on the European Interoperability Framework, SKCMDb creates a legal, semantic, and organisational bridge between institutions like the Slovak Music Centre, SOZA, and public libraries, while also integrating with global platforms like Wikidata and MusicBrainz. We show how library records, music rights data, and streaming metadata can be reused and enriched across systems—supporting discoverability, legal compliance (like local content quotas), and better access to Slovak music.

This presentation will be especially valuable for professionals working in metadata curation, authority control, and digital service design, and those seeking low-cost, high-impact pathways to public-private interoperability in cultural heritage.

Please visit our poster and talk with our team members, Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Zilkova (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 10:30–11:00 in the Gallery. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Check out the entry examples related to Albrecht’s: Missa in C (printed, Hudobné centrum) with library and webshop access points, and linked data on the composition itself Q479, linked to its recorded manifestations.

Next steps

The Slovak pilot illustrates how libraries and national music centres can take a central role in a decentralised European Music Observatory that federates with the EU Open Data Portal, Europeana, ECCCH, DARIAH, and Zenodo. This poster accompanies a companion contribution on the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, including the LīvMDb (Livonian Music Database), which explores how smaller regional repertoires can be embedded in broader, multimodal cultural graphs—advancing the vision of a European Music Observatory as a complement to the European Cultural Heritage Cloud.

library | Daniel Antal

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

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo Semantic Browser

Next steps