Benedict's variations on Carnival of Venice

[David Wilson]

I am planning to upload a pdf copy of this 1882 score available at the Library of Congress website. It's a version of Julius Benedict's Concert variations on the Carnival of Venice, with "an introduction by Schulhoff", and "English version by L. Underwood". From the date and publisher of the item, and other library catalogue entries, I'm presuming "Schulhoff" means Julius Schulhoff and "L. Underwood" means Laura M. Underwood, and that copyright considerations should therefore not disqualify my uploading a copy to IMSLP.

I have a couple of questions, though, about the format of the work page. Should I upload it under category Various or Julius Benedict? My inclination is the latter, since Benedict is usually cited as the sole composer of recorded versions of the piece. However, I haven't yet compared this score with any of the recorded versions, so I don't know how much it differs from them, or how significant Schulhoff's contribution was.

The second question concerns the citation to the Library of Congress as the scanning institution. The library doesn't seem to provide downloadable PDFs, so I've downloaded them as JPEG files. After removing the library stamps from the cover, and its initials from each page, I'll convert the files to PDFs and combine them into a single PDF document. I was planning to list the scanner as the Library of Congress, with a link to the page cited above, so that the citation will appear on the work page as "PDF scanned by Library of Congress". This is slightly misleading, since the library has apparently not made a PDF at all, and the uploaded PDF will be a significantly doctored version of the scanned files which the library actually has available. Does this matter? I'm presuming not, but I thought I'd check, just in case.

[David Wilson]

....
The second question concerns the citation to the Library of Congress as the scanning institution. The library doesn't seem to provide downloadable PDFs, so I've downloaded them as JPEG files. After removing the library stamps from the cover, and its initials from each page, I'll convert the files to PDFs and combine them into a single PDF document. I was planning to list the scanner as the Library of Congress, with a link to the page cited above, so that the citation will appear on the work page as "PDF scanned by Library of Congress". This is slightly misleading, since the library has apparently not made a PDF at all, and the uploaded PDF will be a significantly doctored version of the scanned files which the library actually has available. Does this matter? I'm presuming not, but I thought I'd check, just in case.

I see there's a template for linking to the Library of Congress, and by examining its usage on various pages I have effectively answered this question for myself.

[cypressdome]

I would say upload it to Benedict's category. A field for the translator would have to be added in the following format:

Code: Select all

|Translator={{LinkTr|Laura M.|Underwood}}, English text

I suppose Schuloff's introduction consists of the first four measures of the work prior to the singer launching into "O me beata..." Perhaps a note could be added in the miscellaneous notes field mentioning his "contribution."

I do have one question for you. Why are you using the jpg files? These files were originally scanned in the tiff image format and there is a download link for the tiff on the work's page at the LOC. These images come from the "Music for the Nation" collection that originated from copyright deposits and appear to have been scanned from microfilm. The tiff files are losslessly-compressed black and white images whereas the jpg files (which were derived from the tiff files) are grayscale and in a lossy format. Editing the tiff files will result in no loss of quality but editing the jpgs will cause such a loss (compounded every time a change is made and it is re-saved as a jpg).

[David Wilson]

Thank you for the tips. When I started looking into this, I hadn't given much thought to whether I should use the TIFF files or the JPEG files with the highest resolution. I looked at both of them at a fairly high magnification with a browser, and they seemed to me to be of roughly comparable quality. I had assumed—mistakenly, as it turns out—that the size of the JPEG file would be smaller than that of a TIFF file of comparable quality. As it happens, the size of the final PDF file was quite sensitive to both the format of the starting file and the formats in which I saved the intermediate images after processing. I found that if I started with the TIFF images, the final PDF file was about two orders of magnitude smaller than if I started with the high resolution JPEGs, so I did end up using the TIFFs.