The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Optical Music Recognition is a like OCR but for recognizing musical notation. Are there any libraries using this as part of digitization projects? It strikes me that this could provide incredibly valuable data. For example, allowing viewers of digitized sheet music to play MIDI files of material, or to search for music with a given chord in it. With that said, I haven't heard of many projects that are using this sort of technology in production environments. So, are their examples of libraries using this tech? If so, I would love to hear how they are and to what ends.
Trevor Owens
From when I was still working at the Bavarian State Library I remember that in the Virtual Library of Musicology project (Vifa Musik) OMR was applied as part of the workflow - I think the Capella software was being used at the time (around 2008/09). I do even recall that MIDI files were indeed derived from the OMR, but upon a quick check on the Vifa Musik website, there seems to be no feature (yet?) that would confirm this.
The Digital Music Archives and Libraries Lab at McGill university is another example of use of OMR in a library/digitization context, and they also have a page dedicated to it: http://ddmal.music.mcgill.ca/research/omr
(I had to remove some links because of insufficient reputation, but I'm sure you can find all this via Google too).
Check out ISMIR (www.ismir.net/), the music information retrieval international collaboration. They have folks working on OMR projects from time to time. They also have a listserv.