MusicAustralia: towards a national music information infrastructure

MusicAustralia is a national music discovery service, developed by the National Library of Australia and ScreenSound Australia, National Film and Sound Archive. The service aims to provide seamless access to music and music information resources, in multiple formats, from custodians across all cultural sectors. This paper describes the development of the service, including its architecture, and content base. Service development to date has concentrated on metadata contribution and discovery strategies, together with development of the national digital music collection. In the future, digital content developed to populate the service could be subjected to Music Information Retrieval applications, to further enrich understanding of Australian music. The paper finishes by examining the challenges of achieving these advanced services in an environment where MIR research is relatively undeveloped.