ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the 'ICT Tools for Searching, Annotation and Analysis of Audio-visual Media' technology consultation project, results relevant to music, and other thoughts gained from experience in the area of applying information and communication technology (ICT) tools and activities to music research. Before launching into a description of the project's findings, it is worthwhile to explore the weblog methodology, as it has been an interesting and productive collaboration tool for the project. There are several sub-issues that are of active interest within the digital workflow rubric. Looming large over both issues is the fact of digital rights management (DRM): multimedia content owners want to protect their content and profits, and for distribution of digital-only content, insist upon some form of anti-copying technology. Metadata is literally data about data, but in this case covers all sorts of card-catalogue-type information to help mark and label digital files for easy access. Industrial take-up of MPEG-7 has been inconsistent at best so far.
