New York Philharmonic Digital Archives (review)

Introduction

The New York Philharmonic Digital Archives contains high-quality digital scans of the orchestra's programs, scores, instrumental parts, images, and business documents from the years 1943 to 1970, a time period referred to as the orchestra's "International Era." Although the physical archives begin with the orchestra's first concert in 1842, this date range was picked, according to the Web site, because "it is when Government begins funding the arts, when women join the Orchestra, when the Philharmonic opens Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, when the Orchestra musicians win 52-week contracts, when television becomes main stream and the Long Playing record is invented, and it is the time of Leonard Bernstein's leadership."¹ This is also a time period in the orchestra's history when a wide variety of formats was produced, which allows the orchestra to showcase many different kinds of materials in the Digital Archives. The Digital Archives is partially funded by Save America's Treasures, through partnership with the National Parks Service and the National Endowment for the Arts. It is also funded by the Leon Levy Foundation through its Archives Grant program.

Interface Design

The home page of the Digital Archives has a search box near the top labeled "Search the Digital Archives." To the right of the box is a pull-down menu to specify which type of format to search. One can type in a data range at this screen as well. There is a little question mark icon next to the search box that reveals the following text when the mouse cursor hovers over it: "Search Help: For search tips, click on the 'Help' section above." Although the site does not display browse buttons, one can choose a particular format from the pull-down menu and click "Search" to retrieve all the items available. No advanced search exists. The system will search all formats by default, regardless of the format selected; however, the format selected will be the one displayed in the main part of the page. The text "Search the Digital Archives" also serves as the link back to the home page, although there is no highlighting or underlining on this text that makes this function apparent. There is no other "Home" link on the page. Halfway down the home page is a rotating gallery of hyperlinked images introducing the Archives, as well as a link to the blog "Digital Archives Buzz: Stories from the Digital Archives."² The section marked "New Release" towards the bottom of the page proclaims that the Archives now has 520,000 pages of parts marked by New York Philharmonic musicians, and highlights three notable items from the collection.

Navigation

Looking at these items is a good introduction to the site's content. At the time of this writing, one item on this page is the viola part for the Symphony no. 2 by Robert Schumann, which according to the site is from the Philharmonic's oldest set of parts, in usage from 1854. Clicking on the "Go to Part" link takes the user to the site's image viewer, with controls similar to those found on Open Library.³ The composer, title, and opus number are displayed on the top left of the screen. At the top right are buttons to rotate the image, a button for a magnifying glass that enlarges a small rectangular area when the mouse hovers over the page, a button that displays the metadata record for the part, and a button to share a link to the image via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail (login to ShareThis.com required). Currently, buttons to play audio and video versions are grayed out, but when implemented they will provide links to the multimedia components of the archive. A slider control at the bottom of the screen allows the user to advance quickly to a particular page; other navigation buttons on the right control page...