However, we've just heard that a contemporary music journal from those halcyon days has been digitised, so now you can re-visit what was new then. We're particularly pleased to learn this, because our own former Head of Research, Celia Duffy, was involved in the editing of this journal at the very beginning of her career.
The digitisation of the journal Contact has been completed by staff at Goldsmiths, University of London. It is now freely available at https://www.contactjournal.gold.ac.uk/
Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music was active from 1971–1990, and independently published by its editors. As with many independent print publications of that era, this has meant that, for readers and researchers operating in a contemporary digital landscape, the richness of its resource has been all but inaccessible.
In recognition of this situation, the entire journal has been digitised and made available over the course of a three-year research project. It was led by Dr James Bulley, Research Associate in the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, in collaboration with former editor and co-founder of Contact, Professor Keith Potter, and with the assistance of Dr Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo and Gregory White.
Such projects entail more work than you might think. The project included:-
- Developing best-practice techniques for the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on each article of Contact (creating a searchable, accessible and machine-readable database)
- Aggregation of digitised articles across contemporary research search engines
- Digital preservation to the highest global standards
- The creation of metadata, licensing and digital object identifiers for each issue and article within the archive.
https://www.contactjournal.gold.ac.uk/
