Sweden's first cultural politics: Digitizing the minutes of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music 1771-present

The project is the first complete digitization of a national musical politics in the Western World from the late 18th century to the present: the minutes of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (KMA). By digitizing the minutes including the appendices the project creates an infrastructure that enables researchers from a variety of disciplines to access the decisions and considerations of the academy since 1771.

The minutes of KMA are among the most requested collections at the Music and Theatre Library (Musik- och teaterbiblioteket) at the Performing arts agency (Musikverket), from both national and international researchers. The minutes, however, are fragile: by age and because the appendices have been stitched to them, or are only loosely inserted. Furthermore, they are bound in such a way that parts of the text are concealed.

By digitizing and annotating the complete archive on-site, the project limits the risk that any of the loose supplements would get lost or that the sheets would be damaged. The bound volumes will be taken apart upon digitization and annotated in a database in Calm (an Axiell software). The project will integrate the digital protocols to Alvin and the Swedish aggregate K-samsök (SOCH) that will index the metadata in search engines like Google and ensure international availability through Europeana.

Thereby, the archive will be preserved and made available for new research on the decisions, actions and relations forming the musical history of Sweden.