Library app delivers the goods on music The National Library of Australia's Robyn Holmes in the music stacks holding the NLA's new iPad app called Forte which gives users access to more than 13,000 pieces of sheet music. It could be the start of a joke - a man walks up to a girl in a library and says, "You wanna see my app?" But that's more or less what happened when Jake MacMullin approached the staff member in the National Library's reading room with a little something he'd been working on. That something was an idea for a new app for browsing the library's collection, and the woman behind the desk happened to be the project manager for the library's iPhone catalogue app, Sarah Schindeler. The National Library of Australia's new iPad app called Forte which gives users access to more than 13,000 pieces of sheet music. The app, Forte, now offers a way to browse its vast collection of sheet music by decade or composer, and create favourite lists which can be shared via social media. It also links through to the library's catalogue so that users can learn more about the music they're browsing. The 37-year-old, who runs his own app development consultancy Stripysock.com.au, had been looking into a particular programming technique, and needed a large set of data to test it out. When he logged onto data.gov.au, the government website that publishes public sector data, he came across the National Library's sheet music collection, which had been published 12 months earlier as part of the 2011 LibraryHack competition. "It started really as a programming exercise with that," he told The Canberra Times. I hadn't gotten very far with it when I realised that it actually was a really compelling way to interact with the collection. It was at that point that I thought perhaps someone at the library would be interested in talking about it. Senior curator at the National Library Robyn Holmes said the data had originally been released for the competition in the hope that someone would pick it and use it creatively, but no one had used it. A year later, when Mr MacMullin came into the library, it was a happy coincidence that he chanced upon the very person who would see the potential in his work almost instantly. "When you download the app, you get all the metadata about that music, a list of which scores were published in which decade and by which composer," he said. It's not completely earth-shattering in the sense that the collection was already available online through the library's website. I guess the thing that makes the iPad app a little bit different is just the user experience of accessing the information. It makes it easier to discover music you mightn't have been aware of. The web version is more geared for searching for a particular score. Ms Holmes said the app was a useful showcase of a specific body of material, and that sheet music was the perfect material because it relied on being portable. "Sheet music is only as good as it is to be used, to be played, if you like," she said. Although the covers are wonderful and colourful, by itself, unless you're musically literate, you can't really use it unless you go and actually play it and bring it to life. She said sheet music, even online, usually had to be physically printed out and used as a paper Now you can use the iPad app, and you can have this browsable set on your piano and explore it at the keyboard or stand. Mr MacMullin said the sheet music appealed on an aesthetic level as well. "I'm not a musician and don't actually know that much about music, but the thing that really appealed to me about the data set when I first found it was just the visual side of it," he said. Some of the cover art on the scores is really interesting and you can immediately see changing things throughout Australia's history, the look of a particular decade and some of the covers. He previously worked with the ABC, developing its iView app, and said the synergy between a small, local tech outfit and a large national institution made perfect sense. "Sometimes I think the organisations that have access to some of the most interesting and compelling content mightn't be in the best position to easily do new, exciting things with them on new platforms, and sometimes the people working on the new platforms and maybe have the agility to get apps done a little bit more easily don't have access to the really interesting content," he said. Forte is available through iTunes.