IMSLP on DVD

[Johann Casper Ferdinand F]

During the period starting October 17, 2007, when IMSLP went dark,
I fully expected a mirror site to appear. Surely, I thought, someone
unaffected by the takedown notice would have a complete backup in their
posession, and after a brief delay while hosting arrangements were made
and legal advice sought, the site (or at least a read-only mirror of
it) would reappear, perhaps hosted in the United States where the legal
climate would have been more favorable in the face of takedown notices
from foreign copyright holders (Notably, the Wikimedia Foundation,
which operates the Wikipedia servers, routinely posts material covered
by copyright claims valid only outside the U.S. and has not been the
target of any lawsuit as a result).

No mirror appeared, and it was not until June 30, 2008 -- nearly nine
months later -- that IMSLP reopened, a significant loss to the music
making and musicological community that had grown to depend upon IMSLP,
as well as a source of frustration to those who had contributed to
the project.

I believe that there were two main reasons that no mirror site appeared.
First of all, there were few if any complete copies of the web site
in independent hands. Second, rehosting IMSLP in its entirety is a
technically daunting task even for a competent IT specialist in posession
of all the pieces, because of the extent of customization required.

I made a promise to myself to solve both these problems as soon as
IMSLP or its successor was back on line. There were delays, however.
On the date IMSLP reopened, there was such a backlog of items in copyright
review that only a fraction of the archive was available. The sheer
size of IMSLP posed problems and its structure is such that a certain
amount of new software had to be written to accomplish a download of the
entire site. Finally, the site download had to be performed, slowly,
with care, over a period of several weeks, to be sure that IMSLP's
servers were not overloaded or otherwise adversely affected.

The last of the copyright review by IMSLP reviewers was completed on
March 22. The downloading and DVD production effort is now nearly
complete, and I present to the community a collection of eighteen DVDs.
The DVDs include the complete contents of the image library available
to users in the U.S., together with rudimentary, static index files, in
HTML, organized by composer. It has been updated with changes through
March 28, 2009.

My goal is to place copies copies of the DVD collection in a sufficient
number of hands that IMSLP will never again completely disappear.
It is my hope that everyone who is a part of the IMSLP community
will order a copy.

Using the DVDs, it is a simple matter to create a static IMSLP mirror
site using any common web server platform, including Apache and IIS.

The DVD collection can also serve as a starting point for the many users
who have expressed interest in making IMSLP available via bittorrent.
It will also be of use to those users who do not have broadband internet
connections available, for whom browsing the score library online is not
practical. It can also be used by those IMSLP project participants who
wish to perform automated analysis or maintenance on the score collection
as a whole.

Sample content, index files only with no PDFs, is available at
http://www.nerstrand.net/mirror.

At present, I am offering the DVDs at cost to IMSLP contributors, other
open source contributors, libraries and museums, college and university
faculty, and those who wish to establish mirror sites outside the U.S.,
Canada, and the E.U.

Pricing and ordering information, and requirements for qualifying
to purchase, will be emailed to you if you send a blank email to the
auto-responder at dvdset@nerstrand.net.

It is my intention to offer update DVDs every few months that contain
new material added to IMSLP so that the DVD collction will remain current.

[Yagan Kiely]

Very interesting, I'd be very interested in it (as possibly would my university). (Roughly) what is/will be the pricing, excluding shipping?

[Johann Casper Ferdinand F]

US$75 postpaid in the U.S., $80 postpaid for the rest of the world, including first-class postage.

That's my cost, roughly. I'll probably lose a dollar or two on each set unless there are orders for more than 50 sets, which I don't expect. Most of it is the duplication charges with the blank media, label printing, packaging, and postage making up the rest.

[Yagan Kiely]

Well, I'll see if I can scrape up the money and I'll be onboard. I'll also recommend to my uni (which mentions IMSLP in almost every lecture).

It is my intention to offer update DVDs every few months that contain
new material added to IMSLP so that the DVD collection will remain current.

So theoretically, a university could subscribe to this (more or less)?

[Leonard Vertighel]

Sample content, index files only with no PDFs, is available at
http://www.nerstrand.net/mirror.

Quick question: does "sample content" mean that this is only a partial listing? Unless I'm overlooking something, there are some 600 composers listed, whereas IMSLP has over 1600. Clearly for several of these no scores are downloadable at present, but 600 seems a bit too few.

[Lyle Neff]

Is it safe to assume that the DVD collection does not include the blocked items?

[Johann Casper Ferdinand F]

Sample content, index files only with no PDFs, is available at
http://www.nerstrand.net/mirror.

Quick question: does "sample content" mean that this is only a partial listing? Unless I'm overlooking something, there are some 600 composers listed, whereas IMSLP has over 1600. Clearly for several of these no scores are downloadable at present, but 600 seems a bit too few.

There are 626 composers for whom separate index pages are included. These composers have five or more works available for download.

The "other composers not listed" page, linked at the top of the master index, contains the balance of the composers.

[Johann Casper Ferdinand F]

Is it safe to assume that the DVD collection does not include the blocked items?

The collection does not include any items that were blocked from download in the U.S. at the time the download of the individual file was performed, which varies over the last two months from one file to another. Items that are blocked in Europe but not the United States are included.

So far as I am able to determine, the content included is fully in compliance with U.S. copyright laws. CC- and GFDL- licensed content is included in a manner in compliance with those licenses.

Blocked items are prominently identified as such in the index and PDFs are not included. See the sample content.

[Leonard Vertighel]

What would be nice for a future version would be info on the copyright status in the EU. As far as I could see, this is not included in the current version. This makes it hard if not impossible to use the collection legally in the EU.

[Johann Casper Ferdinand F]

I'll see what I can do. I haven't burned the master for the index CD yet so there is still time for changes.

[Leonard Vertighel]

Apparently your software gets confused by brackets in the composer name, yielding funny names like "of London", "de", "ii", and so on. Also, clicking through some of the pages I found that the link for "Akimenko, Theodore" is broken (didn't check all the links).

Anyway, kudos for the great work. I know how difficult it can be to properly mirror a largish site with all its little inconsistencies.

Edit: Some files are listed as having "0 pages", and some even "0 pages, 0 KB". Maybe broken downloads?

Edit2: In some cases, the publisher is given by a template, like "{{GuilmantArchiveMaitresD|6|1905|136}}". I'm not sure how difficult it would be to expand those.

[Johann Casper Ferdinand F]

The 0 pages entries are, generally, locked PDFs; less often, they may be due to bugs in the scripts that create the index.

They are not download errors. The PDFs are downloaded accurately, and I have performed considerable crosschecking to be sure. Every PDF is verified using tools designed for the purpose. I have posted a list of those few PDFs that were uploaded to IMSLP with errors elsewhere in the forum.

The goal for the index is for it to be, overall, usable. I have no desire to make it perfect. The reason I'm doing this is to get the PDFs in broader hands, not to provide an ideal offline resource. Those who wish to pursue perfection are encouraged to order a set of DVDs, which includes the scripts I've written so far, and the page database, and code away to their heart's content.

I'm surprised by the lack of interest in the collection. At this point it appears unlikely that I will receive ten orders, so I will be unable to meet the minimum for a duplication run.

[Generoso]

Is this an April Fools Joke? Why would anyone buy these when they could just come here and download them as they need them?

[Yagan Kiely]

There would be many benefits from this, for organisations, IMSLP and a few users.

People in Australia do not really have an 'unlimited downloads' option either, so downloading ?40gbs of files is very difficult here.

[Leonard Vertighel]

Is this an April Fools Joke? Why would anyone buy these when they could just come here and download them as they need them?

Maybe people don't remember, but IMSLP was shut down for 9 months in the recent past. During that period, it would have been kinda hard to just come here and download. Of course everyone hopes that this will never happen again. As a matter of fact, having the material in as many hands as possible may actually protect the IMSLP. Once the collection is "out there" anyway, it may be less interesting to try to shut down the IMSLP.

Besides, browsing through the PDF files locally is still faster than over the internet. One can also copy the entire collection onto a portable USB drive (or even the internal disk of recent notebook computers) and have it available even when or where no internet connection is available.

I might take one myself, even though I'm by no means a serious musician. I'm hesitant though as I'm based in the EU, and in order to do anything with it beyond using it as a paperweight, I'd have to filter out the non-PD-EU files.