The Indiana University Digital Library Program, with support from a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is extending the Variations digital music library system to other college and university libraries.

Variations is a digital music library software system that provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images with a flexible access control framework to ensure respect for intellectual property. In addition to access tools, Variations also includes analysis and annotation tools useful in music teaching and learning. With Variations, institutions can digitize materials from their own collections and provide those materials to their students and faculty in support of teaching, learning, and research.

The Variations3 project, funded from October 1, 2005 through September 30, 2009, will work to develop and deploy the Variations software at the following universities: In addition, the Variations3 project is conducting research on a music metadata model and search system centered on the notion of the musical work, which improves the music search experience for users over traditional catalog systems.

Additional information is available in the press release and grant proposal narrative (PDF). Other project documentation is also linked from the About page.

For more information, please contact Jon Dunn, Variations3 Project Director.