InConcert was a nine-month collaborative project concerned with the socio-technical and data-oriented aspects of digital musicological archives. Part of the AHRC-funded Transforming Musicology project, InConcert ran for nine-months in 2014 and explored new approaches to building a digital archive from varying types of performance datasets based on ephemera. The project set out to transform processes and tools for the development, curation, and use of digital archives, seeking new ways of overcoming the barriers of expertise, volume of data, and the gap between cost and benefit that have hampered digital musicology projects in the past. The selected datasets covered different periods and geographic extents and represented a range of stages in the process of curation (from OCR scans to fully authoritative resource). This offered a musicological opportunity to augment and interlink individual datasets, enabling questions concerning the long-term evolution of public musical performance that no single dataset can answer to be addressed.

In addition to producing collaborative publications, workshops, proofs of concept and searchable datasets (see outcomes), InConcert led to the development of a successful bid for InterMusE (2021-), a two-year AHRC-funded project led by Professor Rachel Cowgill and in collaboration with other members of the InConcert project team. Building on InConcert’s exploration of democratic approaches to digitisation and linking different forms of data around musical events, InterMusE is working with cultural institutions, music societies and their communities to improve access to performance ephemera collections and link different forms of data around musical events to form a dynamic, open-access digital archive.