[pdb-discuss] Meeting with people from the CHARM project

Thu Jun 7 12:04:57 UTC 2007

Today I went to KCL and met with the associate director of the CHARM 
project, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (see [1] for previous contact). He was 
really helpful. Similar to us their project has two components:

   1. Compiling a discography
   2. Digitizing public domain recordings

They have been working on (1) for a couple of years and just started on 
(2) a couple of months ago. Summary of discussion follows below.

Regards,

Rufus

[1]: http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pdb-discuss/2006-July/000080.html
      http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pdb-discuss/2006-August/000084.html

## Summary of Discussion

1. Openness of data. Very strongly agreed with sharing and openness of 
data. Currently they are putting their data up so that anyone else may 
use it though they haven't got an explicit license (will think about this).

2. What data. Large amount of discographic data from pre-1950s from a 
whole variety of labels from a whole bunch of sources (another important 
reason to have an explicit licence!). Just scanned 'World Encyclopaedia 
of Recorded Music' and looking to convert scans to text and then to 
'marked up xml'. Would be interested in any assistance in converting 
scans to text (though may just go with the 'India' option).

3. Talked about our near-term plans to get the new database + web 
interface up and running and they were very interested. Like idea of 
write as well as read access and would be happy for us to import their data.

4. Talked about our current datasets we have (composer list, BBC). They 
got hold of the BBC data too but have not done anything with it and 
would be very interested in getting this parsed.

5. I'm going to try and meet their current project coordinator Francis 
Knights who is based in Cambridge.