More today from Rabble, the killer new startup that is working with libraries to create a software-as-service model for local music collections. Follow the whole series on this exciting development with the Rabble tag. ~Erinn
by Alex Carruthers
On August 5th, 2015, Edmonton Public Library (EPL) launched Capital City Records – and you can go check it out, online, right now! Even if you don’t live in Edmonton, you can stream 46 great Edmonton-made albums online, and you can begin to explore the history of our music scene by scrolling through our collection of digitized concert posters. If you do live in Edmonton, sign in using your library card and download your favourite tracks to listen to while you escape to the mountains or go running in the river valley.
Even if you don’t live in Edmonton, you can stream 46 great Edmonton-made albums online
In the month and a half since Capital City Records launched, the music in the collection has been streamed thousands of times and downloaded hundreds of times (consistent with recent radical changes in how people consume music online). We’ve been contacted by musicians asking how they can get their music into the collection. Our concert poster collection has grown by at least a hundred thanks to donations by Tuffhouse Records, The Royal Alberta Museum and electronica act Voice Industrie. We even got our digital hands on a poster for the only time Bob Marley ever performed up this far North in 1977.
As is often the case with a public library’s physical space, the ways that people have encountered and used Capital City Records have been at times surprising and delightful.
An unexpected usage that I am very excited about is how the site became a gateway to the Edmonton music scene for locals who weren’t sure how to access it. We have been contacted by Edmonton Tourism asking for suggestions for local music to form the soundtrack for promotional videos, we were contacted by local dance troupe Toy Guns Dance Theatre, who wanted to dance to the music of local acts and the excellent video series Northern Sessions told us that they mined our collection for local musicians to showcase on their site.
In a post for LAIP back in January, I explained the theoretical push behind this project: the concept of a digital public space. We aimed to build a digital space that provides access to DRM-free content for everyone; a site without advertisements and with features that reflect the community itself. Our community asked for an interactive site with regularly changing multimedia content that was curated by the community. They asked for a site that celebrated contemporary and historical local music with high quality recordings. These are ambitious goals but I believe that we have either achieved them or are on track towards them. A jury of members of the local music community curated our first 46 albums. We have been continuously accepting digitized concert posters and we’ll run another call for submissions this Fall to keep new content flowing in. Downloads are available in high quality file formats such as FLAC and ALAC thanks to Rabble’s transcoding process. Our poster transcription tool is in development to make exploring and annotating the historical poster collection an interactive community project.
Having seen Capital City Records for the first time this August, the local music community has responded with enthusiasm, suggesting partnerships and new features and services. EPL is continuing to work with Rabble to grow the site, and we’ve begun to take advantage of their open source platform to build our own new features in house. If you have any questions about how a digital public space can support your local music community, please reach out – we’re always happy to share.
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