Reading and Writing in the Digital Thicket: Musicology, Digital Humanities, and the Hybrid Music Library

Digitization produces 'hybrid' objects that are readable as digital data files but at the same time still 'contain' the original cultural-historical object. In this perspective, 'digital collections', 'digital libraries', etc. are in fact hybrid collections, or libraries. For musical artefacts, the range of historical media is especially complex, which again concerns the digital world. Digital Humanities publications also contribute to the complex and confusing situation as they themselves are not only 'information', but as a rule, complex and hybrid textual systems that often contain complete digitized re-publications of cultural objects, providing them with digital 'inscriptions', and interlinking them. So the hybridity of 'digital libraries' increases as soon as Digital Humanities publications are integrated. Therefore, metadata should mirror precisely the hybrid nature of the digitized/ digital objects catalogued.