Special issue of IJDL on DLfM

Following the successful Digital Libraries for Musicology workshops held at JCDL in 2014 and 2015, the conveners, Kevin Page and Ben Fields, are pleased to announce a special issue of the International Journal on Digital Libraries on the topic of digital libraries for musicology. The complete text of the call is included here and it can also be found on the publisher's website.

Call for Papers

Special issue on: Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM)

Many Digital Libraries have long offered facilities to provide multimedia content, including music. However there is now an ever more urgent need to specifically support the distinct multiple forms of music, the links between them, and the surrounding scholarly context, as required by the transformed and extended methods being applied to musicology and the wider Digital Humanities.

The Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) special issue presents a venue specifically for those working on, and with, Digital Library systems and content in the domain of music and musicology. This includes Music Digital Library systems, their application and use in musicology, technologies for enhanced access and organisation of musics in Digital Libraries, bibliographic and metadata for music, intersections with music Linked Data, and the challenges of working with the multiple representations of music across largescale digital collections such as the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.

The DLfM special issue will focus on the implications of music on Digital Libraries and Digital Libraries research when pushing the boundaries of contemporary musicology, including the application of techniques as reported in more technologically oriented fora such as ISMIR and ICMC.

This issue follows two years of similarly themed and named workshops. These workshops were colocated with, respectively, Digital Libraries 2014 and the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2015. This call aims to continue a conversation that began in 2002 with the "Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Music Digital Library (MDL) Evaluation", held at JCDL 2002, which was instrumental in the development and evaluation of technical methods now widespread in these research communities.

This focused issue seeks to act as a forum for reporting, presenting, and evaluating this work and disseminating new approaches to advance the discipline; to create a venue for critically and constructively evaluating and verifying the operation of Music Digital Libraries and the applications and findings that flow from them; to consider the suitability of existing Music Digital Libraries, particularly in light of the transformative methods and applications emerging from musicology and "Large, Dynamic, and Ubiquitous" collections of both audio and music related data; to set the agenda for work in the field to address these new challenges and opportunities.

This focused issue will solicit high quality papers that demonstrate exceptional achievements in Digital Libraries for Musicology, including but not limited to:

Music Digital Libraries.
Digital Libraries in consideration of "Large, Dynamic and Ubiquitous" collections of audio and music related data.
Techniques for locating and accessing music in Very Large Digital Libraries (e.g. HathiTrust, Internet Archive).
Music data representations, including manuscripts/scores and audio
Interfaces and access mechanisms for Music Digital Libraries.
Digital Libraries in support of musicology and other scholarly study; novel requirements and methodologies therein.
Digital Libraries for combination of resources in support of musicology (e.g. combining audio, scores, bibliographic, geographic, ethnomusicology, performance, etc.)
User information needs and behaviour for Music Digital Libraries. Identification/location of music (in all forms) in generic Digital Libraries.
Mechanisms for combining multiform music content within and between Digital Libraries and other digital resources.
Information literacies for Music Digital Libraries.
Metadata and metadata schemas for music.
Application of Linked Data and Semantic Web techniques to Music Digital Libraries, and for their access and organisation.
Optical Music Recognition.
Ontologies and categorisation of musics and music artefacts.

Important Dates

January 29, 2016 Paper Submission deadline
April 5, 2016 First notification
May 27, 2016 Revision submission
July 1, 2016 Second notification
September 9, 2016 Final version submission

Guest Editors

J. Stephen Downie, Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois
Ben Fields, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths University of London
Kevin Page, Oxford eResearch Centre, University of Oxford

Paper Submission

Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 30% new material to be considered for the special issue.

All papers are to be submitted by referring to http://www.springer.com/799. At the beginning of the submission process, under "Article Type", please select the appropriate special issue. All manuscripts must be prepared according to the journal publication guidelines which can also be found on the website provided above. Papers will be reviewed following the journal's standard review process.