Towards the Development of the Next Generation of Online Resources for Bach Scholarship

Today’s musicologists are blessed with a wealth of study material for research that can be accessed through the internet from their homes that were previously difficult to gain access, thanks to the efforts of individual scholars and institutions working on both cataloguing and digitising their collections. In Bach scholarship, we have seen a number of projects in the last two decades starting with Bach Bibliography (1997), Bach Source Catalogue (2001), and then Bach digital (2010), the detail of which we are going to hear later.
While it is always good to have new online resources, it is necessary at the same time to review the present situation and to address the neglected issues such as how efficiently we can make use of the resources and discover new knowledge from them, not forgetting that we must not reinvent wheels but build our knowledge on the past scholarship by evaluating it along the way.
In this study session, I will first review the present situation and outline some working strategies based on the fundamental principles of data mining and data sharing, and then my colleagues from the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, Klaus Rettinghaus and Christine Blanken will explain their ongoing project Bach-Digital including their future plans of developing it further to meet the scholarly needs of the next decade and beyond. Our last speaker Nobuaki Ebata will then argue the need to build a database of catalogues that can become a powerful tool for identifying the works, sources and transmission routs that otherwise impossible to trace.
The panel presentation will be followed by a brief panel discussion before opening it up to the floor. We hope to have a meaningful discussion on what we can achieve and fulfil its full potential, particularly how various components of the system should be implemented and maintained.