The Düben Project
In 1987, Erik Kjellberg and Kerala J. Snyder agreed to produce a complete catalogue of the Düben collection as a joint project between the musicology departments of Uppsala University and the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, using a computer database. Planning for the project began in Rochester in 1988, it was launched in Uppsala in June, 1991, and reported in Computing in Musicology: An International Directory of Applications in 1992.Three distinct stages of the Project were envisioned. Stage 1 consisted of designing the database and entering the existing catalogued information into it: this was done by students in Rochester and Uppsala. In Stage 2 the individual manuscripts would be examined and the data corrected and amplified. In Stage 3, individual scholars would refine the data as they studied particular aspects of the collection, work that will continue into the future.
During Stage 1, led primarily by Professor Kerala J. Snyder, a relational database was developed on personal computers, using successively the programs D-Base 3, Paradox, and Access, and moving finally to the web-based database at the Göteborg Organ Art Center. Among the students who worked on the Project in these early stages were Mary Frandsen, Kia Hedell, Lars Berglund, Susanne Fċhraeus, Birgit Heinz, Bernt Malmros, Lena Bergquist, Mats Ċberg, Britt-Marie Hogmalm, John Sheridan, Stan Pelkey, Peder Kodsas, Andrus Madsen, and Tom Elston.
In 2003 The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) made it possible to bring Stage 2 of the Düben Project to its conclusion under the leadership of Erik Kjellberg. This work consisted primarily in adding data to subsidiary tables devoted to the individual parts and tablature volumes, watermarks, and handwriting. Thanks to the cooperation of the Uppsala University Library, it became possible to add to the original plan the scanning of every page of the manuscript sources, with the images now linked to the catalogue. The main encoding and scanning work for Stage 2 has been done by Lars Berglund, Kia Hedell, and during the final year of the project, Juliane Peetz, David Jansson, Katharine Leiska, Alison Hurst and Anne Reese. The database structure has continuously been refined by our data consultant, Master of Civil Engineering Carl Johan Bergsten, GoArt (Göteborg) in close connection with the participants in the project, notably Lars Berglund and Jan Johansson, who has also implemented the current system at Uppsala University. Dr. Peter Wollny, of the Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, has acted as special consultant to the Project during Stage 2.
With the near completion of Stage 2 in September 2006, the database moved to the server at Uppsala University and became available to the general public. In 2014 an additional grant was secured from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, to add the sub-collection of French stage music to the database catalogued. This was done by Maria Schildt, and the work was completed during 2017.
We further acknowledge that some mistakes taken over from the previous catalogues may still remain, and we invite corrections from outside scholars. We also hope that they will contribute to Stage 3 of the Düben Project by supplying additional information from their own research, which will be gratefully acknowledged. Scholars wishing to do so are asked to contact Lars Berglund, at the Department of Musicology in Uppsala, at this mail address: duben@musik.uu.se.