Stravinsky in Urbana: The Case for the Evolution of Digital Library Software Design to Support Musicological Scholarship

This article presents a case study that explores how Digital Library (DL) software can evolve to better support musicological scholarship. Drawing from a diverse set of ephemeral source materials—concert programs, oral histories, audio recordings, and correspondence—the project assembles an event‑focused digital archive documenting the musical presence of Igor Stravinsky in Urbana‑Champaign, Illinois. We describe how the Greenstone3 DL platform was used and extended to support the workflow of musicologists investigating this data‑rich collection. The article details both the technical implementation and the scholarly rationale behind these enhancements, presenting a model for how DLs can better serve research grounded in temporally structured, multimodal, and locally situated materials. From a technical standpoint, the pattern of use of the DL software is an iterative one, whereby a ‘rough‑cut’ cloud‑shared drive, developed by the scholars to store digitized versions of located documents, is transformed into a metadata‑enriched and increasingly refined DL collection. From a scholarly perspective, a key insight has been that, through this process, a musicologist obtains a deeper understanding of the material before them and so crafts new metadata structures that reflect their understanding; these in turn further shape how the DL is formed. Our findings highlight that more can be done in terms of the gearing of the software architectures provided by DL systems to better support the scholarly process, enabling more exploratory and inclusive forms of research and presentation, particularly in fields like musicology where diverse media and temporal narratives are central.