Rescuing the Metastasio Database: a tale of technology, ontology, and Italian Opera

The Metastasio Database is an index to the numerous librettos, arias, and other poetic works of prolific Renaissance writer Pietro Metastasio that describes and links their diverse musical settings and relationships, containing over 9,000 records. It comprises much of the life work of Music professor Don Neville at Western University. In 2001, armed with determination, graduate students, and limited technical and metadata knowledge, he developed a searchable web site powered by a MS Access database to allow opera researchers around the world access to this trove of data.

In 2023, changing technology and security standards meant that the original site would need to be taken down, and an RDM librarian was asked to find a way to preserve the data and make it available for future generations. After over 20 years of edits and updates, the underlying databases were confusing, highly redundant and inconsistent. A team including a metadata expert, the music library director, and an RDM librarian worked with a library co-op student to clean and organize the data, and a new web site was developed in Omeka to provide access. Key to getting the new database to function was developing a data model and a custom ontology to describe Opera Numeri, the Italian Number Opera form.