Linking song collections and communities: Open release and interoperability of a song database and linking tool

There has been an exponential rise in Indigenous community use of archival song data to support the revival of song practice and knowledges, particularly where lineages of intergenerational knowledge transmission have been ruptured by colonisation. Research is needed to: 1. remove barriers to access including incomplete metadata and dispersed metadata and collections; and, 2. ensure newly-created data produced by ethnomusicologists and others, and Indigenous community members, are linked to legacy data. Non- interoperability of database and content management systems used by archives, and content management systems such as Mukurtu CMS, Keeping Culture CMS, and other systems, used in Indigenous communities, is also a barrier.

The interdisciplinary team has previously developed a linking interface and database tool to ingest, record and link metadata associated with archival and newly-created records of Indigenous song using FileMakerPro: the Discovery Database Tool (DDT) 0.9.2 Beta. The resulting metadata and surrogate source-data aggregates are used to support community song revitalisation initiatives that serve to repair ruptures in intergenerational knowledge transmission, and serve to enrich the archival record by linking collections at the level of recorded song item. The DDT seeks to consolidate and optimise data for use in communities and by researchers.

Collaborative research with data management specialists is now needed, to:

• AIM 1. Critically review and revise the design and documentation of the DDT 0.9 Beta for public, open access release.
• AIM 2. Explore and test the tool so it can be used to populate commonly used community content management systems such as Keeping Culture KMS and Mukurtu CMS.
• AIM 3. Explore how the tool can be used to communicate linked metadata back to archival databases.

These serve future priorities of identifying a fair/open platform for the DDT and scopeing correspondence of the design thinking behind the system with other data environments in the university.