Preserving Musical Notation and Composition Software
Our interest in the Fostering a Community of Practice: Software Preservation in Libraries and Archives (FCoP) project is to improve access to contents recovered from born-digital media. Specifically, we are interested in preserving, improving discovery of and providing access to files created by contemporary music composers. These collections are stewarded by the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music. The focus of this project is preserving and accessing born-digital files of three contemporary composers collections acquired by the Sousa archives (Michael Manion, Peter Michalove, and Scott Wyatt). The creation dates within the collections span from 1992 – 2012, representing a significant expanse of time in terms of technological development and software versions. These software titles are often proprietary and may have limited backward compatibility functionality. We are particularly interested in further investigation and development of an emulated/virtual environments where these titles can run in as close to a native environment as possible. We are also interested in scaling this environment to meet the needs of future collections of composers’ born-digital content.