Information
About the repository
What the Polymnia repository is, its document-centred logic and its five core entities.
About the repository
The Polymnia digital repository (polymnia.music.uoa.gr) gathers and organises musicological material: scores, recordings, photographs and other documents produced in research and teaching.
It was developed within the Laboratory for the Study of Greek Music, to manage the research material of the three study cycles of the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, connecting research with teaching.
The core idea: a document-centred logic
The repository is organised around the document. The document is the source: an edition of a score, a recording, a photograph.
This follows the way musicological research works in practice. A study usually begins with a source, and from there its context is mapped: who wrote it, where, for which instrument.
The five entities
At the centre is the Document. Four further entities connect around it:
| Entity | What it describes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Document | The source being described | An edition of a score |
| Person | People or organisations related to the document | The composer, the performer, the publisher |
| Medium of performance | Musical instruments | Violin, piano |
| Place | Geographical locations | The place of publication or composition |
| Work | The musical composition itself, independent of any edition | The sonata printed in many editions |
The entities are linked freely, many to many. A composer may appear in many documents, and a document may have many contributors.
The main benefit of this organisation is that every element is recorded once and linked as often as needed. «Beethoven» is not typed again and again into every document: he exists once as a Person and is linked to all related documents. This avoids repetition, keeps the data consistent, and lets a search start from any entity.
Open standards
The repository's data is described with open standards, so that it stays interoperable with other systems and accessible over time. The fields of each document are presented in four groups matching the term families of Dublin Core and the Europeana Data Model: Identity, Content and subject, Origin and responsibility, Access. The structure the visitor sees is the same structure in which the data is exchanged with other systems.
Rather than recording every name or term from scratch, the repository links to internationally recognised authority files: VIAF for people and organisations, MusicBrainz for musical instruments, and the National Documentation Centre's vocabulary system (Semantics.gr) for terms in Greek. Every reference to «Beethoven» or «violin» therefore points to the same entity as in the other systems using those files.
Contact
The repository is developed at the Laboratory for the Study of Greek Music of the Department of Music Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. For questions about the content, for corrections, or to request access to material that is not publicly displayed, please contact the laboratory.
More
- For the terms on which the material is available, see Rights and use.
- For searching, filtering and citing, see Search help.