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Technical Methods
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The scanning standards were set and monitored by Simon Brown (Birmingham Conservatoire). The website was developed and hosted using the semantic personal publishing platform, Wordpress v.3.4.1. In addition to being made available under the General Public License version 2 and therefore free to use, this meant that the design, build and development of the website can be easily copied for other purposes and similar academic endeavours. Another advantage of using WordPress was the ease of content management, social networking integration and the tools for online display, manipulation and searching of the images. The software, Zoomify was used as the preferred method of image-display system. This allows musicians and academics to search and browse the images, some of which are different sizes, to move easily between and compare multiple manuscripts and editions of the same piece. The following pages hope to give sufficient instructions on how this site was built, and therefore enable other users to develop, build and maintain their own sites for similar research projects in the future.
[toggle_framed title=”DIGITISATION”]Acquisition of images
Due to both time and financial restrictions the images were photographed rather than professionally scanned, using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7 digital camera, with a LEICA DC Lens (10.1MP, 25mm Wide-angle, 12x Optical Zoom). For this reason, users will notice some variability in the lighting quality of the editions. Although every effort was made to ensure that the images appeared to be consistent throughout the virtual collection, it was inevitable that such discrepancies would occur. However, the inconsistencies are not considered to be significant enough to detract from their usability. Indeed, if a user finds any image to be particularly difficult to read, they still have the ability to zoom in closer, thus hopefully resolving the issue.
Quantity and content of images
The Online Edition of Britten’s Performance Annotations (TOEBPA) typically required photographing each annotated score in its entirety, including wrappers and blank pages, unless specified otherwise. Each page was photographed individually and saved as an individual file, with a unique filename. Despite this, TOEBPA typically shows only those pages with music text, along with title pages where relevant annotations might be contained.
Quality of images
The following basic quality standards were established for all digital images in TOEBPA:
- Images were photographed at the highest resolution possible, typically 2736 × 3648 pixels, with Auto White Balance enabled.
- Images were saved as JPEG files.
- No compression or other modification, such as sharpening, was applied to the JPEG files.
- The colour profile was that of the aforementioned camera profile.
- The orientation of pages when photographed was kept as level as was practically possible, and right-side up.The scores were captured as close to the page edges (sometimes visible) ensuring all annotations and printed markings were in view, and the images were never cropped.
- Overall, photographs should capture with fidelity the smallest significant details of each image, without resulting in impractically large file sizes or requiring heavy editing after the scanning process.
Rights
TOEBPA obtained permission from The Britten-Pears Foundation and various publishers to display the digital images in the Online Collection. According to the standard agreement, and as a rule of thumb, copyright in the digital images supplied by The Britten-Pears Foundation is owned by the latter, whereas TOEBPA owns the database rights in the TOEBPA resource. Users will find copyright notices above each of the images displayed in TOEBPA, and should they wish to reproduce any images in full or in part they must first seek the express permission of the supplying institution or other designated copyright holder. (TOEBPA cannot offer any assistance in this regard.) As for the textual material within TOEBPA, normal scholarly citation is of course acceptable, provided that full attributions are given in accordance with bibliographic conventions.
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[toggle_framed title=”WORDPRESS“]Version 3.4.1
Installation: Famous 5-minute install*
- Unzip the package in an empty directory and upload everything.
- Open wp-admin/install.php in your browser. It will take you through the process to set up a wp-config.php file with your database connection details.
- If for some reason this doesn’t work, don’t worry. It doesn’t work on all web hosts. Open up wp-config-sample.php with a text editor like WordPad or similar and fill in your database connection details.
- Save the file as wp-config.php and upload it.
- Open wp-admin/install.php in your browser.
- Once the configuration file is set up, the installer will set up the tables needed for your blog. If there is an error, double check your wp-config.php file, and try again. If it fails again, please go to the support forums with as much data as you can gather.
- If you did not enter a password, note the password given to you. If you did not provide a username, it will be admin.
- The installer should then send you to the login page. Sign in with the username and password you chose during the installation. If a password was generated for you, you can then click on ‘Profile’ to change the password.
System Requirements
System Recommendations
- The mod_rewrite Apache module.
- A link to http://wordpress.org on your site.
Online Resources
If you have any questions that aren’t addressed in this document, please take advantage of WordPress’ numerous online resources:
The Codex is the encyclopedia of all things WordPress. It is the most comprehensive source of information for WordPress available.
This is where you’ll find the latest updates and news related to WordPress. Recent WordPress news appears in your administrative dashboard by default.
The WordPress Planet is a news aggregator that brings together posts from WordPress blogs around the web.
If you’ve looked everywhere and still can’t find an answer, the support forums are very active and have a large community ready to help. To help them help you be sure to use a descriptive thread title and describe your question in as much detail as possible.
There is an online chat channel that is used for discussion among people who use WordPress and occasionally support topics. The above wiki page should point you in the right direction. (irc.freenode.net #wordpress)
XML-RPC and Atom Interface
You can post to your WordPress blog with tools like Windows Live Writer, Ecto, w.bloggar, Radio Userland (which means you can use Radio’s email-to-blog feature), NewzCrawler, and other tools that support the blogging APIs! You can read more about XML-RPC support on the Codex.
Post via Email
You can post from an email client! To set this up go to your “Writing” options screen and fill in the connection details for your secret POP3 account. Then you need to set up wp-mail.php to execute periodically to check the mailbox for new posts. You can do it with cron-jobs, or if your host doesn’t support it you can look into the various website-monitoring services, and make them check your wp-mail.php URL.
Posting is easy: Any email sent to the address you specify will be posted, with the subject as the title. It is best to keep the address discrete. The script will delete emails that are successfully posted.
User Roles
We introduced a very flexible roles system in version 2.0. You can read more about Roles and Capabilities on the Codex.
License
WordPress is free software, and is released under the terms of the GPL version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See license.txt.
*These instructions together with more detail information are available from www.wordpress.org [accessed on 12/02/2013]
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Creating and Publishing Zoomify Images*
Zoomify Images are simple to create and publish. First, open the Converter folder and copy your source image into it. Double-click the Converter icon and use the File | Open menu to select a JPG, TIF, or BMP source image file to convert. Or, simply drag any your source image file onto the onto the clearly labeled drop zone of the converter dialog. A visual display will show conversion progress. When the conversion completes, locate the new folder the converter has created. You will find it directly next to the original source image (that is, in the same folder as the source image).
To publish your new Zoomify Image simply copy the Zoomify Image folder (the entire folder, not just its contents) to your web server along with the ZoomifyImageViewer.js file, and the Assets folder (and its subfolders). Then create a web page (html file) and copy it to the server as well.
The web page must include three simple lines to tell it where to find the Viewer file and the image folder – and where in the page to display the image. Numerous examples are provided in the main product folder.
These FOUR items are all that is needed – your Zoomify Image folder, the ZoomifyImageViewer.js file, the Assets folder, and a web page HTML file.
Please note that the Assets folder contains many subfolders. It is easiest to simply upload the entire Assets folder to your web server, however, for basic uses only the folder ìAssets/Skins/Defaultî will be need to be uploaded. The Viewer expects to find a folder named ìAssetsî containing a folder named ìSkins containing a folder named ìDefaultî in the same location as the ZoomifyImageViewer.js file. This holds the small graphics files that are used to create the toolbar of the Zoomify Image Viewer. The files can actually be placed anywhere, however if the above folder structure is not used, the zSkinPath parameter must be used to specify the location of the files. For example, the ‘ToolbarSkinned’ example web page (Developer and Enterprise products only) uses the zSkinPath parameter to tell the Viewer to use the skin graphics in the Assets/Skins/Dark folder to create a different toolbar look.
*These instructions were copied from the READ ME FIRST.txt file that is supplied with the Zoomify HTML Developer version for Mac [accessed on 12/02/2013]. For complete details on creating and publishing Zoomify Images, please see the User’s Guide in the Documentation folder of Zoomify or visit www.zoomify.com.
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