Chopin Etude #4
Chopin, Waltz in E Minor. Sergei Rachmaninoff, piano. Recorded February 18, 1930.
Chopin. Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9, No. 2. Sergei Rachmaninoff, piano. Recorded April 5, 1927.
This music was found on Internet Archive, a non-profit internet library that features texts, audio, moving pictures and software, as well as the facinating Wayback Machine, which allows the user to explore over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to more recently. Check out Google circa 1998, Microsoft 1996, YouTube circa 2005, or virtually anything else from 1996 forward.
Europeana
Europeana.eu is a prototype virtual library created by the European Commission, with links to over 4 million digital items, including images, texts, videos and sounds, which went live in November of 2008. It can be viewed in a variety of languages, and is intended to provide inspiration through access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage. Contributors include amazing museums, galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual collections from all over Europe.
Certain aspects of the site are still very much a work in process, such as the Communities pages, and they are actively soliciting feedback from users as to what final form these features will take. Already up and running is a My Europeana feature, with which items, searches and tags can be saved. There is also a timeline navigator function, the ability to browse recent additions to the content, and a look into others’ searches.
As someone who just loves discovering a new resource to explore, and loves anything artistic, finding this site felt like I had just entered Valhalla (The project is run by a team from the national library of the Netherlands).
Europeana Version 1.0, which will include access to over 10 million digital items, is planned to launch in 2010.
