Digital libraries and archives are among the very first contributions of musicologists and music theorists to the burgeoning field of humanities computing, or digital humanities, as it came to be known. In their chapter for A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), Fujinaga and Weiss described music databases as one of several categories of digital music scholarship that were transforming the way scholars worked. Several projects they cited, e.g. CANTUS and Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, which got their start in the 1980s and 90s, are still around today. We are using the term “collections” to encompass projects that publish digitized or digital musical sources together with some kind of search and retrieval functionality. Exhibits, which became more common in the web of the aughts, do that and add other dimensions, such as multimedia essays, audiovisual commentary, and other born-digital complements to the sources. These latter projects, as Urberg points out, “intentionally engage the audience with multimodal experiences” (p. 140). In other words, they may be seeking a broader audience comprised of scholars both in and outside of the field, as well as the general public.
In no particular order…