ECOLM and Lute Tablature

ECOLM or “Electronic Corpus of Lute Music” (1999-2002) was a project led by Tim Crawford at King’s College London which developed and populated a database of lute tablature encodings with metadata, for scholarly use, queried using a web interface. Subsequent projects ECOLM II (2002-2006) and ECOLM III (2012) expanded the database and used it for some computational musicological investigations. The resulting database was hosted on a public-facing web server at Goldsmiths, University of London. It is still running today, although nobody is formally responsible for maintaining it.

We consider the status of ECOLM and a number of related lute tablature resources, discuss their audience and challenges for sustainability, and identify three alternative directions for sustainable development.