Music periodicals (and jstor)

[jujimufu]

I was thinking - would IMSLP be interested in music periodicals? I understand that it is a huge extra area to be added to the already increasing load of material that is within the interests of IMSLP to acquire (scores, parts, books etc), but music periodicals seem to be an indispensable part of any music library I've visited.

And assuming that the answer is yes, would it be possible to acquire scanned copies of the periodicals from, say, JSTOR, and after removing the tags and JSTOR-related pages, upload the material to IMSLP? Would that infringe any rights on behalf of JSTOR for having scanned (or paid for the scanned copies) of the periodicals/articles? Does it make any difference that JSTOR itself is not accessible by anyone but only by select group of people (students, teachers, researchers etc)? If an article is clearly within the public domain (e.g. J. Conway Brown's "Notation", published in "The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular" in 1881), does it matter that it is not freely available to the public? If I downloaded the file, removed the JSTOR pages and re-uploaded it here, would there be any legal implications, or because the content is 100% public domain this means I am eligible to do it?

Again, all that's assuming that IMSLP is interested in acquiring music periodicals and related articles.

So.. is it?

[vinteuil]

Yes, having Gazette Musicale, Journal des Debats, Allegemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Neue Zeitschrift, etc. would be wonderful (repeat, wonderful!)

[jujimufu]

I agree but how about "legally possible" too? ..

[Carolus]

Periodicals fall under the same copyright rubric that scores do. Apart from the USA, the term is determined by the death date of the (last surviving) author. For the USA, it's the publication date which (primarily) determines the term. As long as we're talking about scans of public domain originals, there should be no problem. If things contain metatags, hyperlinks, and additional annotations added by the publisher in recent years, they all have to be removed naturally. The same goes for logos and trademarks.

[Lyle Neff]

I've added only a couple of periodical articles (or sets of articles) to IMSLP -- Cui's articles from L'Art about Anton Rubinstein's historic piano course, and Famintsyn's articles about the original 1876 production of Wagner's Ring.

I would think that, if IMSLP is going to include more material from periodicals, it would be better to separate the articles and put them under authors -- unless there'd be some way to index entire issues of journals within IMSLP, which would be considerably difficult.

[jujimufu]

Yes - maybe a whole different section of the project dedicated to periodicals and journals. In which case, maybe there could be a different section for books. (It would make it easier for someone looking particularly for books - and there would always be links in a composer's page which would redirect to the book in the "Books & Writings" (or whatever) section of IMSLP.)

But that's the thing - maybe that gets a bit beyond IMSLP's scope. After all, IMSLP stands for "music score library", not "music score, and potentially books by composers, or not, and maybe periodicals referring to works of those music scores, or the books, and discussion on the aforementioned items library". But I guess with PML it becomes more open. But by establishing the "music library" subtitle/description, we will lose a lot of links from "sheet music", or "music scores", as these words won't be very prominent in the website's content.

[vinteuil]

Some ideas:
1. a separate section (to replace the IMDBP slot on the portal) in which whole periodicals would be found
2. a separate genre "Periodicals" for either whole volumes (perhaps the periodical would get a composer page) or individual articles.
This is not beyond our scope - some very utile music scores have been posted in periodicals. And who doesn't want to read Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz's articles??

[jujimufu]

1) sounds great! Absolutely does. The only problem would be - wouldn't we want to integrate it later on with the rest of IMSLP? (like with IMDBP?)

And if that was the case, then we should also have links at composers' pages, linking to articles they've written. Or if an article is related to a particular composition (or edition), then the article should link to the edition and the work should link to the article.

Maybe -however- setting up a whole new project page for periodicals would be too much work.. I mean, it would obviously be very handy as music periodicals are something quite different than music scores themselves (although quite related to them). I do believe, however, that Books should also have a separate section in the portal. Think in terms of actual, physical libraries: music scores are in one area, books about music are in another, and journals & periodicals in a third. And it would be great if there was a maximum of interaction between the three sections - so, for example, if you had Rimsky Korsakov's book on orchestration in the Books area, in the Misc. Comments of the book entry you could have a list of all the works mentioned in the book, linking to the actual works in the Music Score area of IMSLP. Similarly, on Rimsky-Korsakov's composer page in the Music Score area, there could be a section saying "Books by the composer", and the links would redirect to the Book section of IMSLP.

Dunno. Just an idea. (I find it a bit annoying that Berlioz's Treatise on orchestration is located after Te Deum, Op.22 and Tristia, Op.18.. not only does it make it more difficult to spot (different editions have slightly different titles), but in terms of content it is also out of context.