Digitisation

 

Acquisition of images

The libraries from which images were ordered received a copy of CFEO's digitisation specifications. Not all were able to supply material at the defined standards, however, while others agreed to supply images to CFEO at a lower resolution (e.g. 300 ppi) than the one requested by the project team. For this reason, users will notice some variability in the quality of first-edition images within the CFEO resource. (Compare, for instance, the images of the three different editions of the Mazurkas Op. 17, likewise those of the Ballade Op. 23.) Although CFEO has made every effort to ensure consistency across this large virtual collection, such variability is inevitable given that the c. 5,500 images in CFEO were obtained from over twenty different suppliers.

Most participating institutions employed in-house digitisation staff, but in some cases the scanning or digital photography was outsourced. For example, PL-Wn digitised the Chopin editions held by PL-Wnifc (formerly in the collection of the Towarzystwo imienia Fryderyka Chopina), PL-Wtm and PL-Wekier. (See the abbreviations listed under library and other sigla.) Lynda Sayce (employed on DIAMM) photographed the material held by GB-Lam, while Schecter Lee digitised US-NYpm's editions.

Only one institution – the Verlagsarchiv of B. Schott's Söhne in Mainz – actively declined to participate in CFEO; that is why no score of the Polish first edition of the Waltz in E minor appears in CFEO, as it has been impossible to locate an equivalent source elsewhere. (See the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions.) Despite repeated approaches, CFEO received no response from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna (whose score of the Concerto Op. 21 published by Breitkopf & Härtel could however be substituted by an exact counterpart from the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow) or from the Museo de Fryderyk Chopin y George Sand in Valldemossa (hence the absence of Cramer, Beale & Co.'s edition of the Waltz Op. 64 No. 3).

Users occasionally will find that the images of certain pages listed in the work tree are unavailable. This is usually because the institution holding the score in question could not supply digital images thereof – for example, if these pages were missing from the original itself. CFEO regrets any inconvenience caused to users.

 

Specifications

CFEO utilised the following specifications, which were derived from those employed in the University of Chicago's Chopin Early Editions project and in Phase 1 of the Online Chopin Variorum Edition.

Quantity and content of images

CFEO required scanning of each score in its entirety, including wrappers and blank pages, unless specified otherwise. Each page was to be scanned individually and saved as an individual file, with a unique filename.

Quality of images

The following basic quality standards were established for all digital images in CFEO:

  • Images should be scanned at 400 ppi, 24-bit colour.
  • Images should be saved as TIFF files on best-quality CD-R or DVD (though other modes of delivery, such as transfer on external hard drive, could be arranged).
  • No compression or other modification, such as sharpening, should be applied to the TIFF files prior to dispatch.
  • The colour profile should be the camera profile, and should be embedded during capture (i.e. not after scanning).
  • Pages should be scanned using a colour bar (such as the Kodak Q13 colour separation guide and grey scale) placed alongside each page in question. CFEO also welcomed the use of a ruler, where possible, to determine original sizes of documents.
  • The orientation of pages when scanned should be level and right-side up.
  • All page edges should be visible, and the images should not be cropped.
  • Overall, scans should capture with fidelity the smallest significant details of each image, without resulting in impractically large file sizes or requiring heavy editing after the scanning process.
 

Rights

CFEO has signed licence agreements or otherwise obtained permission from the various supplying institutions to display the digital images in the Online Collection. According to the standard agreement, and as a rule of thumb, copyright in the digital images supplied by a given institution is owned by the latter, whereas CFEO owns the database rights in the CFEO resource. (Note that the rights to CFEO material taken from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions are held by the authors thereof.) Users will find copyright notices above each of the images displayed in CFEO, and should they wish to reproduce any images in full or in part they must first seek the express permission of the supplying institution or other designated copyright holder. (CFEO cannot offer any assistance in this regard.) As for the textual material within CFEO, normal scholarly citation is of course acceptable, provided that full attributions are given in accordance with bibliographic conventions.

Further information about the rights issues surrounding CFEO as well as other online resources like the Online Chopin Variorum Edition and the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music can be found in the report of a CFEO/OCVE/DIAMM seminar on image delivery and rights held at King's College London on 11 June 2004.