Documenting a song culture: the Dutch Song Database as a resource for musicological research

Abstract

The Dutch Song Database is a digital repository documenting Dutch song culture in past and present. It contains more than 173 thousand references to song occurrences in the Dutch and Flemish language, from the Middle Ages up to the present, as well as over 18 thousand descriptions of song sources, such as song books, manuscripts and field recordings, all adhering to high quality standards. In this paper, we present the history and functionality of the database, and we demonstrate how the Dutch Song Database facilitates and enables musicological research by presenting its contents and search functionalities in a number of exemplary cases. We discuss difficulties and impediments that were encountered during the development of the database, and we sketch a future prospect for further development in the European context.