Music Australia: Building innovative partnerships for online access to music made, played and recorded by Australians
The turbulence in the music industry poses both challenges and opportunities for cooperative archiving, resource discovery, online access to and delivery of musical sound. This paper examines how some of the challenges are being addressed in a national music service and demonstrates the success of collaborative resource discovery on a national scale. Music Australia www.musicaustralia.org, hosted by the National Library of Australia, has grown from a small handcrafted pilot project that integrated recorded musical sound and score into a full production service that successfully brings together the music resources of more than 50 organisations. The latest Music Australia innovations link the music industry with the arts, academic, cultural and information sectors to provide a coherent vision of the nation’s musical corpus. In addition to the delivery of digitised historical recordings, Music Australia is also integrating into its service the latest hits directly sourced from the music industry.