The Liner Notes Digitization Project: Providing Users with Cultural, Historical, and Critical Music Information

Digitizing cultural information is a complex endeavor. Not only do users expect to have access to primary information like digital music files; it is also becoming more important for digital systems to provide contextual information for the primary artifacts contained within. The Liner Notes Markup Language (LNML) was developed to provide an XML vocabulary for encoding complex contextual documents that include an album’s packaging, informational notes and inserts, liners, and album labels. This paper describes the development of the LNML framework, its major structural elements and functions, and some of the more pressing problems related to usability and purpose. The current LNML model is based on the examination and encoding of fifty albums from the 80s Rock genre. We are currently encoding fifty additional Jazz albums, which will provide data to augment and strengthen the model. Development of the LNML is ongoing, with plans to examine Classical and World Music examples to further augment the model. 1. DIGITIZING CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION Digitizing cultural information is a complex endeavor. Not only do users expect to have access to primary information like the content of a literary work, or digital music files; it is also becoming more important for digital systems to provide contextual information for the primary artifacts contained within. When providing access to physical objects, communicating context is relatively straightforward: physical aesthetic cues give the user subtle but important contextual information about the object, while supporting information is available at a glance. This is not true for digital artifacts, which must have their implicit contextual information explicitly defined. In addition to bibliographic information, album packaging includes information pertaining to the historical context and critical reception of music contained within. Liner notes often contain essays written by major critics or cultural figures; the notes record authoritative information on the group, its members, and recording details; and the aesthetic design of the packaging helps scholars place the work historically in context. Unfortunately, in terms of vinyl collections, album packaging was often discarded when the artifact was added to an institutional collection, and if the notes were kept, the information contained in the packaging was unlikely to be digitized. The result is that unless users have access to an original pristine physical artifact, much of this important cultural and historical information is lost. Musical album packaging (defined here as the entirety of the physical manifestation of a musical work: the album label, the outside jacket and the album sleeve) contains a significant amount of contextual information, which is rarely included with digital manifestations of that content. The supporting materials, like the physical packaging, liner notes, album label, album design, and album art are a valuable resource for people who want to delve deeper into the music they listen to. For example, Jazz albums typically use the physical album label to define the company that produced the record, the pressing and publisher’s catalog numbers, the genre, sub-genre, and instrumentation information, the title of the song, the composter, arranger, performing unit, and a full list of musicians, as illustrated in Figure 1. In contrast, popular music applications like iTunes typically include inadequate and incorrect or misleading information with their sound files. For example, the “Information” tab in iTunes provides access to Song Title, Artist, Album, and Year, and the “Year” element typically refers to the date the album was digitally re-mastered or released, not the original creation or release date (which is not represented anywhere). Figure 1. Example album label with extensive bibliographic and artistic information.