According to its authors, the Musical Heritage Network Instrument Encyclopedia, a Web‐based multimedia guide to musical instruments, was designed to “provide freely accessible multicultural material to educators, students and Web browsers.” The site is an initiative of CHICO (the Cultural Heritage Information and Community Outreach project) which is a part of the School of Information at the University of Michigan‐Ann Arbor. The core of the site’s material is based on the Stearns Collection, a collection of musical instruments at the University of Michigan. The Instrument Encyclopedia was designed for an audience of grade 6 and up.
To explore the contents of the Encyclopedia there are several options. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, only one seemed to be operational, and that was the option to browse by instrument type. The choices for browsing by instrument classification and by geographical origin are listed but not currently available. Users can search the “Instrument Database” using simple or advanced search forms, but the search tool didn’t work for me (“server down” messages). Also, it appears that this search engine doesn’t search the Instrument Encyclopedia itself but a separate Instrument Database of the holdings of the Stearns Collection; this isn’t entirely clear from the Web site. No search help is available, but there are plenty of opportunities to send e‐mail to CHICO with questions or suggestions.
Each entry provides the description of an instrument, including its construction, country of origin, historical background and how it is played. Most entries include references to other sources, some of which are hypertext links to Web resources. Most entries include pictures; a few include sound clips. Under “Resources for Educators” users can find a glossary, links to other musical instrument collections and other resources.
I was prepared to love this site, but I came away from it disappointed. Most disturbing to me were the frequent typographical errors, which detract from any site but especially from an educational one sponsored by such a venerable institution. Several of the hypertext links were dead. In one place an image that was supposed to be clickable wasn’t. As noted above, the search engine didn’t function and two of the three browsing indexes were out of operation. In addition, I did not find any material in the Encyclopedia that was newer than 1998, and most had been most recently updated in 1997. The site has an aura of benign neglect.
Another concern I had with this site was its coverage. Some important instruments, such as the violin, viola and the modern piano, did not have entries in the browse list. One might guess that this was because the site’s content was intended to be multicultural and therefore non‐Western in focus, but this is not articulated anywhere on the site. Furthermore, other “Western” instruments, such as the trumpet and trombone, are included, and important non‐Western instruments such as the kora, tabla and the sitar are not. Nowhere on the site are any criteria given for how instruments were selected for inclusion. If the authors of the Instrument Encyclopedia do not intend to take an encyclopedic approach to the subject, perhaps they should consider calling it a sampler, or a collection, rather than an encyclopedia.
It is unclear to me what the advantage of such a resource is for educators and students other than the fact that it is freely available. Many print encyclopedias exist that provide descriptions and images as well as references for further reading. The real advantage of a digital encyclopedia of musical instruments would be pairing the descriptions and images with sound. CHICO’s Instrument Encyclopedia would benefit enormously from adding more sound clips to the entries. That would give students and educators alike a real reason to stop by the site. Otherwise, the Instrument Encyclopedia is nothing more than a source for brief descriptions and digitized images of a small but eclectic selection of musical instruments.
