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The Glenn Gould Archive on the World Wide Webby S. Timothy Maloney, Did you ever wonder how tall Glenn Gould was or what colour his eyes were? 1 Are you interested in knowing what his advice to graduating conservatory students was, or hearing archival recordings of the pianist unavailable anywhere else? Perhaps the thought of off-beat photos of Gould disguised as some of the fictitious personae he assumed from time to time, or reading a doctor's analysis of what kind of patient the inveterate hypochondriac was, might pique your curiosity. All of these items, and many more, are now available in the comfort of your own home via the Internet. The National Library of Canada's (NLC) Glenn Gould Archive is an extensive site on the World Wide Web which is drawing increasing interest and praise. L'Actualité magazine (May 15, 1998) invites "lovers of Glenn Gould [to] curl up in front of their computers as their idol did at the piano" to visit the "documents, photographs and recordings [which] bring back to life the famous pianist on the Web". We hope that Gould himself, an outspoken apologist for the electronic media, would appreciate the NLC's use of the Internet to disseminate information and documentation found in his archives. We could think of no Canadian more appropriate for our first archival Web site. A quick survey of the digital Glenn Gould Archive yields the following highlights:
The virtual Glenn Gould Archive was one of the original Web projects undertaken by the NLC. In the mid-1990s, the NLC Music Division was keen to exploit the vast dissemination possibilities afforded by the World Wide Web to publicize its collections and services, and make them more generally accessible. By 1996, the NLC was ready to commit resources for discrete, short-term digitization projects by which it could assess their impact on personnel, systems, work flow, etc., to help it make informed decisions on how to plan and structure future digitization activities. After an internal competitive process, which resulted in executive-committee approval-in-principle for several such projects to proceed, applications for funding were submitted to Industry Canada's (IC) SchoolNet Digital Collections program in the spring of 1996. Four NLC proposals were approved and funded by IC that year, including the Canadian Music Periodical Index and Phase 1 of the Glenn Gould Archive digitization project. The Glenn Gould Archive is not a full-text archival Web site on the model of the sites created by the University of California, Berkeley, though we hope it will be eventually. It was conceived as a prototype site which would make use of work already done at the NLC. For example, the Library had produced graphics, captions and a catalogue for its 1988 Glenn Gould exhibition, which later toured nationally and internationally. It had published a two-volume catalogue of Gould's archives (which were acquired by the NLC in 1983) and had created comprehensive databases of the textual and audiovisual documents, though the databases were accessible only at the NLC premises in Ottawa. All these materials, which still existed in digital form, were potential raw material for the proposed Web site, along with scanned images of documents, artifacts and photos from the archival fonds. The Gould digitization project was originally expected to be a four-stage undertaking to meet the NLC's desire for discrete, short-term digitization projects. In June 1996, a pair of student contractors, Alain Bard and Janson Labond, started work on Phase 1. After collecting definitive versions of various Gould-related graphics, texts and databases in existence at the NLC, the students spent their summer designing the Web pages, creating bilingual introductory texts for the site, encoding the existing digital texts with Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), and digitally scanning archival documents and photographs. These activities were closely supervised by the Music Division, which also coordinated with staff in the Information Technology Services (ITS) branch, who made the migration of the Music Division's two Gould databases to Web-compatible software possible and designed the interfaces between the databases and the Web pages. Thanks to the expertise and professionalism of the students and the climate of close collaboration between the Music Division and ITS, work progressed so rapidly in Phase 1 that tasks originally slated for later stages of the project were completed the first summer, enabling us eventually to finish all developmental work on the site in only three phases. Phases 2 and 3 of the Glenn Gould Archive digitization project were undertaken between January 1997 and January 1998, again employing young contractors, with funding donated to the NLC by the Stentor Alliance specifically for digitization activities. While Alain Bard was unavailable after Phase 1, a recent library-school graduate who had already performed digitization work for the Library of Congress, Margaret Collins, joined Janson Labond for the next two phases. Her training and background were invaluable for the updating and verification of all data in the "research tools" added to the Web site, including the bibliography, discography, videography, filmography, and a comprehensive listing of Gould's radio broadcasts. The discography was so extensive and of such interest to Gould fans and researchers that we decided to create a Web-searchable database for it instead of presenting it in a basic table format, as we did with the research tools. In addition, the AMICUS cataloguing records for all Gould discs in the NLC collection were enhanced to include details on recording sessions and other data much sought after by discographers. Once again, the expertise of ITS staff was indispensable and their willing collaboration was the key to timely and practical solutions to various technical problems. The general philosophy behind the Glenn Gould Archive Web site was to include something for every level or type of potential visitor to the site, from elementary-school student to university professor. In addition to meeting a basic aim of Industry Canada's SchoolNet Digital Collections program (which funded Phase 1), to provide Canadian content on the Internet for Canadian students, we felt it important to present this "once-in-a-century phenomenon" (as the pianist Gina Bachauer referred to Gould) on as many levels and through as many media as possible. Thus, while the brief chronology of Gould's life, the selective reading list, and such texts as Robert Fulford's "Growing up Gould" and the pianist's own "Glenn Gould interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould" might provide an appropriate introduction to Gould for younger visitors to the site, the more detailed research tools and texts such as Kevin Bazzana's "Gould and the Culture of ‘Fluctuating Stasis'" and Gould's famous (or infamous) "The Prospects of Recording" would probably be better points of departure for adults. For the same reasons, there are caricatures of the mature Gould and photos of young Glenn with his dogs, and exquisite collages, portraits and poetry by award-winning artists and writers. By including the widest possible array of material, we hope to engage and stimulate every visitor to the site. Future plans for the Glenn Gould Archive Web site include adding more writings by and about Gould, more art and poetry (as we become aware of it), more archival audio recordings, and information on Gould-related conferences and events as they take place. The research tools will also be updated periodically, as required. The only planned new element will be video excerpts. As for the long-term outlook, perhaps the NLC will, given copyright permission, eventually be able to digitize all the textual documents in the Gould archival fonds and mount images of the original documents as well as transcriptions, when appropriate, on the Web site. Such a project would require resources which are not currently available to the Music Division, but a great deal has already been accomplished with donated funds. A little over two years ago, this Web site was only an idea. Now it receives almost 100 000 visits per month. We hope the future may permit the NLC to celebrate the life of Glenn Gould in even more ways. Meanwhile, we invite you to become better acquainted with Canada's greatest classical musician of the 20th century by exploring the Glenn Gould Archive at www.collectionscanada.ca/glenngould/index-e.html. Adapted from Canadian Association of Music Libraries (CAML) newsletter __________ 1 Gould's passport, which is digitally reproduced in the National Library Web site's Virtual Exhibition, gives the details as 5'11" and blue.
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