Digital Local Music Project

We are looking for albums produced in the last five years by Edmonton musicians in any genre. Our jury of local music community members will review them and selected albums will be given an honorarium in exchange for the right to share the music through EPL's new digital public space: Capital City Records.

It is time for an update!

First, the September 17th hackathon – from our perspective, the hackathon was a great success. We had 13 participants come and design us a model of the possible technical infrastructure of EPL’s local music project. It took three hours of focus, some pizza and some very smart minds! Check out what we came up with -

What did we learn? As some participants probably suspected, we learned that building the site we want with the functionality we want was outside of EPL’s existing staff resources – at least if we want to finish it in 2015. The hackathon gave us the big picture of our project’s development and showed us that we need to look outside the library for help.

With impeccable timing, we were approached by the Rabble: a new company created to provide public libraries with the infrastructure for a digital local music collection (find them on twitter and Facebook). We are very excited to be partnering with the Rabble to build our first digital public space. Our web developers will be collaborating with Rabble to build a space that is unique for Edmonton and that responds to the recommendations and interests expressed at YEG BandCamp and other events. Right now we’re working towards a launch in April 2015!

This project is committed to open source development. Once the site is built, Rabble will open up all of the code we have developed together on GitHub making it accessible to all and keeping the public in digital public space.  

Thank you to everyone who came out to the hackathon to help give us direction and special thanks to Yellow Pencil and Startup Edmonton for their support.

EPL is partnering with Yellow Pencil to host a hackathon at Startup Edmonton on September 17, from 6-9PM. No one has ever built exactly what we are hoping the local music project will be. We want to build the project in Drupal 7 and we are hoping to run the music hosting through SoundCloud using their API. We're inviting web developers, Drupal developers, SoundCloud developers and anyone else with tech savvy who wants to participate to help us answer these three main questions:

• What does the basic architecture of this site look like? • Can the SoundCloud API support this project? In what specific ways? • What is missing from Drupal 7 that we need to build?

What's in it for you? Food, camaraderie, and the pleasures of problem-solving, building something new and helping out your local library.

As the last post explained, we are currently working through some of the legal and technical challenges behind the great ideas from YEG BandCamp.  Without getting anyone’s hopes up in vain, what I can say is that we want to build a collection of local music that will be made available online and we want to build a participatory digital archive of local music history, including everything up until yesterday.

We are hoping to launch early next year and when we do, we want to have some great content on the site. Right now we’re putting out a call for collections of digitized concert posters. Do you have a digital collection of local concert posters you can share? We’re looking for people with the legal right to donate content to us that we will then put online and preserve forever. If you an artist, a promoter or a venue, this is an opportunity to have your contributions to local music history recorded for posterity. We are particularly interested in concert posters because the information on them - who, where, when - provides a lot of the essential information required to build maps or chronologies of our collective history.

We will credit both the contributor of the poster collection and the poster artist, if they are different people. So far Edmonton-based Union Events and Steve Derpack of JCL Productions have agreed to share their poster collections with us, which we are incredibly excited about. If you are interested in contributing or if you have any questions, please contact [email protected].  

Since March, the Edmonton Local Music Project has been motoring along behind the scenes. A lot of exciting and new ideas were proposed at YEG BandCamp. What we’re working on right now is finding out how to legally and technologically realize these ideas. Once that is locked down we can announce what we’re going to build. Some questions we’re asking are:

What’s does the legal contract for including local musicians in our digital collection look like? Typically the library will buy a CD and put it on our shelves. Buying a digital album and sharing it online in one way or another is an entirely different beast. We want to make sure we’re following the law and being fair.

What is the best open source platform to build our digital public space on? The values of the open source movement, sharing and creating collectively, are the values of the library. They are exactly what we aim to make possible in our public spaces and the same values will shape our digital public space.

This is a word party attended by the words that came up the most at Edmonton Public Library's YEG BandCamp when we asked "What are the best things about the local music scene?" and "How could we amplify the best things?"

There was a lot of local venue love at YEG BandCamp and appreciation for the way the scene is supportive and diverse. There are great festivals, there is money to go around (though there could be more!) and we have a long and storied history.

Isolation is a term that came up a lot.  Sometimes it pointed out that good musicians often leave after being nurtured by the local scene, but usually it came up in a positive way. As in, isolation makes us stronger and unique. Isolation means that we have to find ways to entertain ourselves in the long winter months, which encourages creativity and collaboration.

What is there to learn from this? Well, if you're in the local music scene and you weren't at YEG BandCamp, now you know that people were saying nice things about you. I think it also shows that the "scene" includes more than musicians - it includes a complex network of support that was recognized by YEG BandCamp participants. 

On March 22nd the Edmonton Public Library hosted YEG BandCamp to bring people from the local music community together and get some ideas for how to build our first digital public space. Inspired by the Seattle Band Map, the John Peel Archive and the Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall, EPL wants celebrate our local music scene and its history. We want to build something that actual Edmontonians will actually use. So we pulled together some Edmontonians who we know really care about local music and asked them what will/could/should EPL's digital public space do?