Towards a Digital Document Archive for Historical Handwritten Music Scores

Contemporary digital libraries and archives of music scores focus mainly on providing efficient storage and access methods for their data. However, digital archives of historical music scores can enable musicologists not only to easily store and access research material, but also to derive new knowledge from existing data. In this paper we present the first steps in building a digital archive of historical music scores from the 17th and 18th century. Along with the architectural and accessibility aspects of the system, we describe an integrated approach for classification and identification of the scribes of music scores.