Digitization Projects: UK’s Royal College of Music Digitizing Historically Significant Musical Instruments

From the Royal College of Music:

The Royal College of Music will create the largest virtual collection of historically significant musical instruments in the UK in a major partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, the Horniman Museum and the University of Edinburgh.
The collection will be available worldwide thanks to the Google Cultural Institute. Online visitors will be able to explore 40,000 instruments held in more than 100 collections across the United Kingdom. The user-friendly resource will include detailed descriptions, high quality imagery and sound recordings of many of the instruments.
Expected to be complete by 2017, MINIM-UK (Musical INstrument Interface for Museums and collections) has received an award from HEFCE’s Catalyst Fund and represents just one initiative in the RCM’s extensive digitisation programme.
A second collaboration with the Google Cultural Institute will showcase even more of the RCM collections. Set to be launched in December 2015, the virtual exhibition will provide online access to tens of thousands of paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs. The RCM is the first international music conservatoire to partner with Google in this way.

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The collected data will be added to the already accessible and online MIMO, the European Commission-funded project that presents the collections of over 20 museums online, and Europeana, the site displaying millions of digitised items from libraries, archives, audio-visual collections and museums. The public will be able to access information, and in some cases listen to and see images of the instruments, at any time, guaranteeing access to the institution’s collection during the revamp of its Kensington buildings.

See Also: Yale Collection of Musical Instruments (Search and Browse)
infoDOCKET post from November 6, 2014 on the

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