FAIR but Flexible: Designing for Dynamic User Contributions in Digital Musicology Resources

The FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) have become an established paradigm for scholarly data management, but effectively assume an established dataset to share, collected or curated by a professional scholar or archivist. In contrast, the InterMusE project is working with amateur-led concert societies whose members will not be conversant with standardised ontologies or data standards. Furthermore, their archives are valuable both to them and for a range of scholarly study (e.g. musicology, history, sociology), but will inevitably be digitised in a piecemeal fashion with incremental additions and annotations by academics as well as community members. Community and scholarly reuse is a central aim for the data produced, but the FAIR principles need to be re-imagined in order to create a digital resource that is both FAIR and flexible. Based upon the real-world experiences of InterMusE, this paper highlights the FAIR issues at play, and presents its approaches to addressing these issues designed to improve the sustainability and impact of smaller, dynamic digital musicology resources.