Open Access: "Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music", Library of Goldsmiths College, University of London

The Library of Goldsmiths College, University of London is very pleased to announce the digitisation of the journal Contact which is now freely available here.

Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music was active from 1971–1990 and independently published by its editors. As with many independent print publications of that era, this has meant that, for readers and researchers operating in a contemporary digital landscape, the richness of its resource has been all but inaccessible. In recognition of this situation, in the years 2016–2019, the entire journal was digitised and made available over the course of a three-year research project led by Dr James Bulley, Research Associate in the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, in collaboration with former editor and co-founder of Contact, Professor Keith Potter, and with the assistance of Dr Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo and Gregory White. The project included developing best-practice techniques for the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on each article of Contact (creating a searchable, accessible and machine-readable database), aggregation of digitised articles across contemporary research search engines, digital preservation to the highest global standards, and the creation of metadata, licensing and digital object identifiers for each issue and article within the archive.

Publication, NewsHelene Heuser