Wiering, Frans, Thesaurus musicarum italicarum and the Law of the handicap of a head start

The idea for the Thesaurus musicarum italicarum (TMI) emerged from my research into Renaissance music theory in the early 1990s. One of my most important resources was the Thesaurus musicarum latinarum (TML), containing hundreds of Latin treatises that could be automatically searched. But for my principal interest, Italian music treatises by Zarlino and his contemporaries, a similar resource was lacking. I therefore decided, in 1996, to create one myself. But already then the technical model of TML seemed rather outdated, using unstructured ASCII text only and separating illustrations from their context. Instead I decided to be as state-of-the-art as possible. I would use highly structured SGML markup following the TEI guidelines, provide editorial markup, hyperlinking and annotation facilities, and integrate rich multimedia content. Working along these lines, my collaborators and I managed to create a corpus of over 30 treatises. Some of these were distributed using a novel medium, the CD-ROM, and around 2002 all of them were published on the web using a very powerful SGML web server called DynaWeb.

Fast-forward to 2014. The infrastructure had become too reliant on outdated technology and could no longer be maintained within Utrecht University's web infrastructure. A major overhaul was needed, which, thanks to a grant from DANS, we were able to implement (http://tmiweb.science.uu.nl/). But what was lost in the migration process? Is the 'new' system ready for the 21st century or does it still reflect 1990s ideals and values, in particular an unlimited trust in the willingness of researchers to immerse themselves in technological complexities? I will conclude by discussing some lessons learned about 'musicology-centred' approaches to systems design.