In recent years many libraries have made their early music prints and manuscripts available online as ‘digital facsimiles’. These are raster images that are not amenable to automatic searches for content, but require a human reader to browse them by eye. For lute music, an international team under the direction of Tim Crawford is currently building a new repository that stores the musical content in addition to the images, thereby opening the door to new levels of music research based on music information retrieval. This article describes the building of the corpus, its content and some of the possible fascinating use cases

From Facsimile to Content Based Retrieval: the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music