Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) (review)

DIAMM, founded by Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey and managed by Julia Craig-McFeely, is an online archive designed to create high-quality digital images of thousands of medieval music manuscripts, thus preserving fragile and rare materials unavailable elsewhere and providing scholars access to said images. The project, begun in 1998, has grown to encompass all music manuscripts in the United Kingdom and nearly all manuscript fragments up to the year 1550, and now includes numerous manuscripts from around Europe for a total of over 7,000 images. The project's first phases were focused mainly on high-quality image digitization (according to the site's technical information the capture resolution goes up to 144 megapixels, a level of detail necessary for digital restoration). Through such high-quality imaging and advanced restoration techniques, the DIAMM team has been able to restore images that were otherwise illegible. Quite detailed descriptions of the imaging, archiving, and restoration processes and standards are available on the "Technical Information" page (http://www.diamm.ac.uk/techinfo/index.html).

Two functions of DIAMM's site will be of significant importance to researchers and librarians: first, the collation of and access to excellent images of medieval music (a far cry from the microfilm upon which scholars relied even a decade ago), and second, the metadata collected with the images, which includes information on archives, sources and bibliographic information related to the sources, and the music contained within the sources.

Users access manuscript metadata and images through either browse or search functions. Although both are essentially source-based methods of access at this point, DIAMM promises a more open method of access based on additional metadata that exists in DIAMM's database but which is currently hidden to users. (DIAMM's technical director, Paul Vetch, wrote that the upcoming changes to the site "will make the data more broadly accessible across quite a wide range of subject domains. The actual Web application you see online at the moment is being completely replaced and rebuilt.") While any user may browse and search DIAMM, access to more than thumbnail images requires free registration. Registration grants the user permission to view and manipulate images (including enhanced or ultra-violet images when available), save notes and text transcriptions, view any public comments on the manuscript images, and access a list of all manuscripts to which they have added comments or transcriptions at "My DIAMM." The browse function is very straightforward: the user chooses a country, at which point a list of the country's cities listed in the databases is given, and by choosing a city the user is presented with a relevant list of manuscripts (the novice user simply wanting to browse images might be well-served to choose a city in Great Britain since it is whence comes the majority of the available images). A check mark next to the manuscript means that images are available for viewing online. From a list of sources the researcher may also choose to click on the name of an archive or library; these records provide contact information for the libraries in DIAMM, their RISM sigla, and a list of all manuscripts indexed.

Searching is unfortunately relatively basic at this point, although as previously mentioned upcoming changes to the site will allow for more comprehensive searching of DIAMM's database. Currently, users can search by archive, archive city, provenance, century, and source description. This last search option is hampered by a lack of Boolean searching capability, thus the researcher who knows only the manuscript's "name" (i.e., the Eton Choirbook or the Mellon Chansonnier) will have some difficulty finding the correct record. DIAMM's search tips will help the savvy searcher use the search function properly, although there are still some inconsistencies. For example, searching the source description "Mellon chansonnier" pulls up eighteen results (this is due to the lack...