MuDoc system
MuDoc (Multimedia/Music Documentation) is a general digital repository designed to store and disseminate digital content. MuDoc was designed expressly to accommodate digitized ethnomusicological fieldwork, in order to solve certain problems inherent in traditional archives (preservation, quality assurance, access, dissemination) by offering the following features:
- Distributed database, via Sun's federated brokerage system, LIMBS (a single portal communicates with multiple repositories via a central broker system). Repositories can be located anywhere on the Internet; users see a single, seamless repository.
- Web portal user interface, with permanent workspace and messaging system
- Web submissions of hierarchical multimedia content (e.g. audio, video, text, notation, image, arranged in a "folder" hierarchy)
- Peer review system (enabling users to request editorial or reviewer roles, and providing a complete peer-review workflow)
- Permanent storage and backup of accepted submissions
- Non-hierarchical keyword ontology (supporting peer review and search), structured as a directed acyclic graph of concepts.
- Tagging of submissions with keywords and metadata
- Annotation: submitting objects to annotate other objects (including annotations)
- Linking submissions to existing repository objects, generally
- Search by metadata or keyword (including recursive search through the ontology)
- Rudimentary DRM (digital rights management), including e-commerce (designed to provide an income stream to artists)
- Downloading content (subject to DRM restrictions)
MuDoc's initial deployment will reside at folkwaysAlive, in the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology (Department of Music, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta).
MuDoc was conceived by Michael Frishkopf and designed by Michael Frishkopf and David Descheneau, with open source brokerage components contributed by Sun Microsystems, and with programming from Sun, Make Technologies, Clearstream, and AICT. Support for this project was generously provided by grants from Alberta's Ministry of Innovation and Science (now part of the Ministry of Advanced Education and Technology) and the Office of the VP (Research), University of Alberta.
