Under construction!
ECOLM is an ambitious research project funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board. It will be carried out by researchers in the Department of Music at King's College London, with valuable input from the Computer Science Department, and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities.
The project, whose initial phase is for two years, commencing in October 1999, is under the general direction of Prof. Laurence Dreyfus, and will be guided by Mr Tim Crawford. After the initial phase of design and the implementation and testing of a few pilot studies, further funding will be sought for large-scale data entry to enable the provision of a significant publicly-accessible scholarly resource.
The principal goal of ECOLM is to store and make accessible to scholars, players and others, full-text encodings of sources of music for the Western-European lute (and other sources insofar as they are relevant), together with graphical images from manuscripts and printed music, such codicological and paleographical detail as is helpful to the potential users, and bibliographical data, including, if possible, the texts of important studies where necessary permissions can be obtained.
Relevant ‘other’ sources might include keyboard versions of lute pieces, but would where possible also be full-text encodings. They would typically comprise music for keyboard, wind or string instruments, especially the viola da gamba, or vocal ensemble.
The technical resources of ECOLM will include facilities for online searching of the bibliographical and musical material, and complete access via the World Wide Web (with suitable restrictions according to the classes of material and user). Also viewing, playing (via computer sound-system or MIDI) of lute music, and printing (again subject to relevant permissions).
For further details, here is an edited version of the ECOLM project proposal.