Appeal for Help with Sibley Project

[icactus]

Since we've gained a lot of new members with the WIMA merger I thought I'd take the opportunity to seek/beg/implore/request/etc anyone who would be willing to help upload files from the Sibley Music Library to IMSLP. It is very easy and we've made a lot of progress but there is a huge backlog that continues to grow unless we can get some more people to help.

The process is easy and largely automated for you (it takes me about 5 minutes start-to-finish per upload at this point), we just need people to fill in the details when uploading. Here's the page for the list of links we have yet to upload:

http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Sibley_Mirroring_Project:Link_List

If you would like to help please reply here or contact me if you need any help getting started.

THANK YOU!

[aldona]

I haven't got as much free time as I had hoped, but I'll continue to upload a few here & there, whenever I can.

AJ

[coulonnus]

I would be glad to help, but the public-domain-ness of the few scores I have examined is obscure! Example http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4714 does not have "PD-US only" in this list. The composer Rudolf Friml (1879 - 1972) is probably PD-US only. And the page says Copyright © This item is protected by copyright, with all rights reserved.
Please could an Administrator provide the list of the PD-everywhere " Sibley files?

[icactus]

I would be glad to help, but the public-domain-ness of the few scores I have examined is obscure! Example http://hdl.handle.net/1802/4714 does not have "PD-US only" in this list. The composer Rudolf Friml (1879 - 1972) is probably PD-US only. And the page says Copyright © This item is protected by copyright, with all rights reserved.
Please could an Administrator provide the list of the PD-everywhere " Sibley files?

Hi Coulonnus,

Thanks for the interest in helping out! If only there was an Administrator who could tell us which links are PD-everywhere!!

The entries marked "PD-US only" are links that I or someone else have already checked and found to be not yet public domain for the Canada server (like 1802/4714). So we then edit the page and mark the link as "PD-US only" and go on to the next in the list. Nobody has looked at any of the unlabeled/untagged links yet, so those are the ones that need need their PD-status determined.

Also, the "This item is Copyright ©..." can be ignored as you should instead always verify the PD status based on the composer/editors year of death (Google saves the day when Sibley doesn't list the dates for the composer). The Sibley Library puts that copyright note at the bottom of every file in its system (PD musical scores is just one part of the online system) so it doesn't actually have any relation to the particular score. Our job is to determine the PD-status for the link though it is almost always at least PD-US for it to be in SIbley's online collection.

If you find a link that is PD-everywhere then upload it (The ones you already did look perfect!) and delete it from the list. Otherwise leave it on the list and write a little note next to it about why it is not PD-everywhere yet.

I've been working through the 4000s one by one so at the moment but feel free to jump in anywhere on any of the lists!

Does it make sense now how to go about this? Please let me know if you still have questions.

Thanks again!

[jfarrington]

Sorry for the copyright confusion of some of our scores. Let me explain what happened. A couple of years ago we migrated systems, and the new system allowed for greater flexibility in many areas, one of which was copyright status. However, when the migration happened, the system defaulted to the phrase that you see about them being in copyright, when clearly they aren't (the reason for this being that there are many documents in UR Research that are still under copyright, such as our dissertations and theses). We haven't gone back through the thousands of entries that were affected, instead concentrating our efforts on putting more scores up for everyone to enjoy. Perhaps someday we'll have the time to go back, but that may be quite some time in the future as we have thousands of more scores that we are scanning and making available. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions.

[coulonnus]

How to proceed when a file is already present on imslp? If I am sure the imslp score is exactly that of Sibley it is easy to change the |Scanner and |Misc Notes fields on the imslp page and remove the link from our list. Otherwise do we need two slightly different scans of the same score?

[coulonnus]

Is it a good idea to pick up a file at random in our list of links, instead of uploading the first PD one? In my view this decreases the probability of two contributors uploading the same file together.

[icactus]

If the file is the exact same (I just check file size instead of downloading if the edition is the same) then I just edit the tags like you said. Otherwise, if the edition is the same, I decide if one is better than the other and then click on the file number and upload a newer version of the same file. You can't use the sibley uploader in that case and don't forget when manually uploading to add "Sibley1802.xxxxx" to the file name.

The other way is to use the sibley uploader and then, in the wiki-text, cut and paste the "File 1" location of the new link over onto the existing link location and then delete the rest of that new entry. I also change the date uploaded in that case.

Also, until we get a lot of people working on the same project it's not likely to have overlap. But you're probably right random links are safer unless that bothers you in an OCD way

[icactus]

Please could an Administrator provide the list of the PD-everywhere " Sibley files?

Coulonnus -

Your wish is my command! I've written a little program to search the sibley links and mark all the ones that are PD-US only and remove them to a separate area. It will need some time to run but once it's done I'll edit the sibley link pages. There will still be some where we have no dates and I'll find and mark those with a separate program but for now this will take a large number of links off the list and save us wasted time.

[coulonnus]

Your wish is my command!

Thanks!

[icactus]

If we could get one or two more people to commit to uploading a few links each day (or as often as you can) we may actually be able to get caught up to the present. Sibley ads about 20 new files per day and we're doing slightly better than that at the moment so a few more hands on this deck will really help!


As a side note - why don't people post pictures with their posts here?

[coulonnus]

I put a request into http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Other_music_score_websites
Feel free to improve it!

BTW each time I go through the 7 steps of "How to Get Involved", can we say I made an upload? a transfer? a mirroring? a submit? I think our pages about this should adhere to a unique word.

[icactus]

For any beginners who would like to help out:

The Sibley Project page has been updated with a visual walkthrough of the entire process of adding a file:
http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Sibley_Mirroring_Project:Walkthrough

And a simplified introductory page for the project. Hopefully all this trouble can attract one or two more people!
http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Sibley_Mirroring_Project

[daphnis]

One of the things that would improve the efficiency of the Sibley mirroring is for those who contribute to either avoid or delay mirroring scores which are already present here. On many occasions I notice people uploading scores that Sibley digitized that we already had in the same edition. In many cases, ours are better (and smaller) than those at Sibley and offer no benefits, really. It's probably best, seeing how there are still so many scores to mirror, to avoid uploading scores from Sibley if we already have the exact same edition, unless cases where Sibley offers one of superior quality.

[coulonnus]

[...] seeing how there are still so many scores to mirror [...]

When I began the sections above 7000 I hit a lot of links to page with "restricted access" or "withdrawn", which I copied as a comment into the link list page. I -and others - would be more productive if there was some automated procedure to remove such links from the link list pages.

Does anybody know how many accessible scores there are in the Sibley library, eligible for an imslp mirroring or not? Then I'll update the Other website page.