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Muscat Introduction ↑

muscat is a framework for cataloging music documents (handwritten and printed music scores). It is a Rails application that provides facilities for creating and managing Marc21 records with a focus on music. The project was initiated by the United Kingdom working group of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and then developed further by the Swiss working group. It is released as an open-source project.

Source code and further documentation ↑

The source code is available on GitHub github.com/rism-ch/muscat

The cataloguing guidelines submodule is also available on GitHub github.com/rism-ch/muscat-guidelines

The documentation for version 1.0 and 2.0 (legacy) is available at docs.rism-ch.org/muscat/1.0/

Application structure ↑

The basic entity in muscat is the Source class, which describes a single source. The Marc21 data is stored directly in the database, and is parsed to a Marc object with holding MarcNodes recursively. A MarcNode is a field at the first level of recursion and a subfield at the second level. Relevant information (such as author name) is also extracted from the Marc record and stored in the same database row. A the same time, a Source is put in relation with the authority data, or foreign classes, stored directly in the database. The foreign classes representing data are:

  • People (Contributors)

  • Institutions

  • StandardTerms

  • StandardTitles

  • LiturgicalFeasts

  • Catalogues

  • Places

This way all the basic information related to a Source is always available on the database. Marc21 records and these classes are automatically kept in sync, using ids to relate the various entities.

The web interface is a standard Rails 4 application following the MVC paradigm.

Full-text search on the data is handled using the Solr full-text index. Every time a Source is saved, relevant data is extracted and sent to the index.

How the Marc21 data is managed, and how the interaction between Marc records and database-stored elements is configured in the tag configuration, in config/marc/tag_config*.yml, one for each model that supports Marc. This also defines how records should be handled by the system (for example, if a tag is repeated).

The behavior of the show/edit pages for Marc records is controlled in the config/editor_profiles directory, using the EditorConfiguration, which, on the base of the MarcConfig (described above), decide which/how tags are shown or edited.