The Samvaad Foundation – Archiving Hindustani Music

This paper will discuss the unique challenges faced by Samvaad Foundation - an independent archive of North Indian classical vocal music based in Mumbai, India - in its attempt to migrate its collection to the digital domain while creating a comprehensive, relevant, metadata-rich catalogue of its holdings.
The information that this archive intends to capture in its metadata is extremely domain-specific, very non-standard and has very specific use-cases that are peculiar to the tradition and practice of Indian classical music. This paper will attempt to demonstrate what this information is and how it is extremely important to students of this musical tradition. It will then talk about how we intend to harness technology to increase the accessibility and relevance of our holdings by making them discoverable to students of music in a number of useful contexts.
The paper will finally discuss the successes and failures faced by the archive while attempting to capture this metadata in a way that is standards compliant, interoperable and sustainable.