IMSLP Forums

Hereby I announce the launch of our new - albeit still incomplete - Community Portal. As it says on the page, it is meant to be the central place to learn about contributing to IMSLP.

The score submission guide is now divided into four parts, connected by a navigation bar in the top right corner: Overview (introduction), copyright, scanning, submitting. I intend to merge the content of the score submission guidelines into those four pages, possibly leaving the "special cases" as a separate subpage of the submission guide.

The page on scanning needs yet to be developed. Any help/suggestions for this are very much appreciated: what are the easiest methods (and with minimum software requirements) for various platforms to produce good PDFs? I have also copied some discussion to the talk page.

A few questions:
File formats: Is it expected that these pages grow significantly, or can it all be merged into one page?
VARIATIONS project: Should we consider this as an (ongoing) IMSLP project, much like the acquirement of the Gutenberg score archive?

And finally, two suggestions:
I find the "current events" link in the navigation bar rather superfluous and suggest to remove it.
Large portions of the sitemap are now redundant with the new Portal. I suggest the creation of a page called "IMSLP:Browsing" or the like, which would contain the first section of the current sitemap, plus possibly some other material that is not strictly community related. The sitemap link should then be replaced with a link to the new page, probably in the "browse scores" box.

Thank you very much, Leonard, for a great organization and layout job on the Community Portal. It's very clear and concise, with easy access to the detailed information propective contributors need.

A couple of comments:

The "view this score" feature at Sheet Music Plus, while useful, is not very extensive. Only a relatively small number of the 300,000-plus titles there have this feature available. I don't know if it's necessary to mention this as anyone going over there will find it out soon enough. Hopefully this feature's availability will expand over time.

I find that the VARIATIONS scores to be of limited usefulness due to the very low (72 dpi) resolution. There is a way to improve these scores considerably using Photoshop. I'm very busy right now, but when I get a break in a few weeks I'll go ahead and post the procedure on the scanning page. Perhaps some of the real programmers here can use this to some up with a more automated method of handling these scores if I spell out in detail the process that one goes through in Photoshop.

Thank you very much Leonard for all the reorganization work you have done on IMSLP! Your suggestions sound good... go ahead and do them

About the file formats, they are static and will probably never grow.

Carolus wrote:I find that the VARIATIONS scores to be of limited usefulness due to the very low (72 dpi) resolution. There is a way to improve these scores considerably using Photoshop. I'm very busy right now, but when I get a break in a few weeks I'll go ahead and post the procedure on the scanning page. Perhaps some of the real programmers here can use this to some up with a more automated method of handling these scores if I spell out in detail the process that one goes through in Photoshop.

By all means! I've also been trying to figure out a way, but have not yet succeeded.