Sound and Music is thrilled to be requesting proposals for an exciting opportunity to review the current data and metadata in the British Music Collection.

This review will also produce a report and reccomendations for improvements and future development of this unique digital archive.

About this RFP  

The British Music Collection Online is a unique historical and contemporary living archive of composers from across the UK, which includes information about their works and other contextual material.

After a period of initial development we are now looking to commission a review of the data within the collection, including:

* What data and metadata there is, what the gaps are, how it is currently structured

* Recommendations for its future development and re-development that encompass

• Improving systems, presentation and visualisations
• Possibilities for opening up new assets
• Improvements to enrich users’ experience
• Options and opportunities for revenue generation
• Potential for connecting with other online platforms and collections nationally and internationally

About the British Music Collection

The British Music Collection Online is a discovery platform for new music in the UK. Its content grows daily as composers join, contribute their work and related content, and as a diverse group of curators open up its content for users to discover in unique and varied ways.

The website is closely related to the British Music Collection physical archive – a publically accessible collection housed at state-of-the-art archive centre Heritage Quay at the University of Huddersfield, which is predominantly used for academic research purposes: 

And as custodians of the physical archive we work closely with Heritage Quay and the steering group to preserve, save and digitise physical content, some of which is added to the online British Music Collection Online.

The British Music Collection online continues to evolve into the largest digital collection of contemporary sound and music in the country with recent improvements including; embedded AV content, richer contextual information, improved listings of works and composer profiles, and extracts of scores. From a static online catalogue it is now starting its journey to become a dynamic content and user driven system, with a vibrant and active community engaged both in exploring and curating the site.

The Data

The data is predominantly and currently structured into composer profiles, where (to a greater or lesser extent) composers and their works are described and presented, with the site currently containing information about over 3,000 composers and over 40,000 associated works, alongside over 7,000 community-driven freetags , over 3,000 of which are unique.

What do we want the review to tell us?

• How might we open up as much useful data as possible for online discovery?
• How might we develop new potential data sets, or deal with incomplete sets?
• What standardised systems and capturing methods can be developed, for current and new data sets?
• How can we improve our processes, software and technology ?
• What dead data can be disregarded?
• What are the unique data and assets of the British Music Collection Online?

Submit a proposal 

Sound and Music is interested in hearing from individuals or organisations, with sound knowledge and demonstratable experience in this area. 

Proposals should be submitted to: Sound and Music’s Head of Digital, Marketing and Communications: victoria.johnson@soundandmusic.org

Deadline for proposals: Noon, Friday 9th June

Read the full Request for Proposal here >>