Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800

Developed in the 1980s by McVeigh, this is a database of 18th century London concerts based on all available newspaper sources. It is an example of fully processed and authoritative data, but in a legacy database – the Calendar of London Concerts database is a very early example of the use of digital technology in musicology and has been used extensively, although the technology is now very dated. Here the challenges relate to data extraction and transformation. We will investigate ways of making the data more available and connecting it with the other concert datasets and external linked data. The British Library’s digitisation of the Burney newspaper collection – the source of McVeigh’s data – offers further opportunity for linkage.

This data is currently  available in Excel and CSV format at:  http://research.gold.ac.uk/10342/

Towards a Collaborative Digital Archive of Musical Ephemera