Digital research is an increasing priority in the humanities, and yet scholars frequently lack the necessary technical skills and support networks to realise their ideas. This talk introduces a collaborative project between the University of Oxford, the British Library, and the Royal Library, Denmark, which represents one attempt to overcome these issues. Combining the MerMEId software, the British Library manuscript holdings, and musicological expertise, the project is working to create a freely accessible and searchable catalogue of the works of the composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934). This talk will discuss the challenges and advantages of the project, as well as considering future possibilities for this form of digital musicology.

Joanna Bullivant is a musicologist educated at the University of Oxford, who specializes in early twentieth-century British music, musical modernism, and music and politics. She recently completed a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham, and her monograph based on that project is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is now involved with the project ‘Delius, Modernism, and the Sound of Place’, using the MerMEId software developed by the Danish Centre for Music Publication to create a digital catalogue of the works of Frederick Delius.