The Web-induced emergence of massive storage capabilities and ubiquitous communication means has had a significant impact on the digital preservation of cultural artifacts. Music, with its large, millenary-old corpus, has been one of the main beneficiaries of this movement, with the design and implementation of digital libraries that can store and organize a wealth of digitized and symbolic scores, along with other information such as audio files and ontologies. The Neuma platform presented in this paper is both a repository and a service provider for musicians and musicologists to help them “publish, annotate, query, transform, and analyze scores.” Its long-term goal is to be the nexus of collaborative efforts focusing on the analysis of large music corpora.

To illustrate the inner workings of the Neuma framework, the authors survey two digital library applications: Sequentia, which contains 3,500 pieces of ecclesiastical chants, and Psautiers, where 1,350 music pieces linked to a collection of 150 psalms are managed. Neuma’s architecture enables the use of both server-based music storage and client-side local databases (for domain-specific information) when performing analyses. Generic querying and rendering services, for score and annotation display purposes, can be accessed via the server.

This easy-to-read paper describes a large French project in the humanities that is partially funded by the Bibliothèque Nationale. It will be of interest to musicologists and computer scientists interested in the preservation of music and, on a larger scale, cultural artifacts.