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Keeping the score

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 09-2015    Views: 2109   





The New York Philharmonic is digitising 175 years of archives - including 8 million pages of documents and nearly 10,000 hours of audio-visual content - and making it all freely available online.

Founded in 1842, the New York Philharmonic is the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States and the third oldest in the world. As such, the Philharmonic Archives is one of the oldest and most important orchestral research collections in the world. It traces the entire history of the Philharmonic and its more than 15,000 performances around the world and is an important record of cultural history in New York City and beyond.

In September 2009, the New York Philharmonic received a US$2.4 million grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to digitise 1.3 million pages of material from its archives, making them available to scholars, musicians, students, and the general public over the Internet. The Archives' collections contain material that dates back to the Philharmonic's first concert in 1842, but the first phase of the digitisation project focuses on the Philharmonic's International Era, 1943 to 1970. This included digitising 1,300 scores marked by Leonard Bernstein and Andre Kostelanetz, 3,200 programs, 8,000 folders of business records, 4,200 glass lantern slides, 8,500 photographs, and 72 scrapbooks of fragile press clippings.

The Philharmonic is one of the first institutional repositories to embark on a digitisation project of this size and scope with the intent of making all digitised material available worldwide. In order to complete the project, it needed a highly scalable document management system that could handle heavy daily use while continuously streaming large volumes of data. The solution needed to be cost effective, handle large files and have strong digital asset management capabilities.

The organisation focused on open source technology as it is easily scalable, reliable and cost effective. In addition, open source claims to offer more flexibility to create a solution that is sustainable over the long term and can be easily shared with other institutions.

WORKING IN CONCERT
The Philharmonic researched open source enterprise content management products evaluating Alfresco Enterprise and Fedora Commons, an open source digital repository framework commonly used for academic digital libraries. The team selected Alfresco because it offers a commercial product backed by support services, can easily scale for high volumes of content, supports any file type and has a robust developer community. In addition, Alfresco could serve as a content platform for the Philharmonic's born-digital archives and be customised to meet the organisation's specific needs into the future.

To help implement Alfresco and streamline the content ingestion process, the Philharmonic turned to Alfresco Partner, Technology Services Group (TSG). TSG's OpenMigrate software controls the flow of all metadata and images into and out of the Alfresco repository, allowing the Philharmonic to perform bulk metadata imports, image ingestion, and Web-enabling assets by indexing content in the front-end 'Solr' search application. Content rendering is performed prior to ingestion using a standalone implementation of ImageMagick, an open source software suite that converts the original JPEG images into web-optimised derivative files of various sizes.

The Philharmonic uses clustered Windows servers so that the image conversion and ingestion process can be scaled to meet even the most demanding schedule. Each day, some 120,000 jpeg images are ingested and up to 75,000 are deleted to make way for corrected replacement images. At the same time, the front-end site must maintain speedy content delivery for public use as well as internal content proofing. This level of demand requires a highly scalable system such as Alfresco in order to maintain accurate indexes while providing fast content retrieval and modification.

The asset viewer utilised for the final presentation of digitised assets is the open source GNU BookReader, started by the Internet Archive and now hosted on Open Library (openlibrary.org).

The viewer allows users to pan, zoom, rotate, magnify, view thumbnails, and virtually turn pages. The painstaking detail in the Philharmonic's photography methods and quality control workflows allows end users to see more and do more with the digital asset than they ever could with the physical item on a table in the reading room.



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