Content area
Full Text
Neue Mozart Ausgabe Online, part of the Digitale Mozart Edition. Operated by the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute. http://DME.mozarteum.at (Accessed June-September 2010). [Requires a Web browser, an Internet connection, and a PDF reader.]
Complete works editions have long been an important resource for scholars and musicians. Although their high production costs have made them susceptible to shifts in academic trends and availability of funding, large critical editions continue to play an important role in twenty-first-century scholarship. Recent years have witnessed an increase in online digital collections; the C.P.E. Bach complete works is currently making performance parts of each volume available on its Web site (http://www .cpebach.org), nineteenth-century editions of Bach, Handel, and others are now available in facsimile online (made possible by the expiration of their copyright), and the Digitale Mozart Edition (DME) is at the forefront of this trend, with the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA) already completely digitized and available online. The DME has also begun to implement plans to make archival documents pertaining to Mozart's life available online, as part of their overall project to "provide world wide access to the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ... [and to] include a critical edition of letters, documents and libretti as well."1 Only the NMA Online will be discussed in this review. The content is free and open to the public for private and educational use. Commerical use is prohibited, as is wholesale reproduction of the edition.
With 126 volumes and almost 35,000 pages digitized, the NMA Online-available in German, Japanese, and English-offers numerous advantages to libraries, scholars, and musicians over printed volumes. Of great interest to librarians will be the ability for users to view any part of the edition, download it as a PDF file, and print a hard copy if needed. This will reduce wear and tear to printed editions and decrease use of copy and scanning equipment (as it renders reproduction of the originals unnecessary). The ability to print is useful for musicians since users can annotate their own...