Variations
The Indiana University Digital Music Library

Variations at IU has been retired and replaced with Media Collections Online. For more information, see the Retirement FAQ.

Variations at IU Bloomington

Variations provides online access to selected recordings and scores from the Indiana University Cook Music Library for use by IU Bloomington students, faculty, and staff. The entire collection is accessible from computers in the Music Library. Outside the Music Library, access is limited to music faculty and to students currently enrolled in a class for which Variations is used.

To use Variations, read about where to find it in the user guide.

There are three places to get started using Variations. For any of these to work, Variations should be installed on the computer you are using, though some limited audio streaming functionality is available via the web browser.

  1. Course Reserves. Browse the Music Library course reserve lists. Click on links for materials in Variations.
  2. IUCAT. Search for online recordings or scores using IUCAT, the online catalog of the IU Libraries. For tips on finding Variations materials in IUCAT, see our help guide.
  3. Oncourse. Faculty may place links to Variations recordings and scores in Oncourse course sites.

Variations Elsewhere

The Variations Digital Music Library system (software, not content!) is freely available for use by other institutions. For more information about deploying Variations at your institution, visit the Variations open source page on Sourceforge.

Variations-Related Projects and History

Variations-related software has been in use at Indiana University since 1996.

  • VARIATIONS. Describes the original VARIATIONS project, in use at IU between 1996 and 2005.
  • Variations2. How the current Variations got started. Browse the many research reports and articles that describe the work leading to the 2005 deployment of a new Variations system at IU.
  • Variations3. The follow-on project to make the Variations system available to institutions beyond IU. Variations was first released as open source in 2009.
  • Avalon Media System. Originally known as Variations on Video, Avalon is an open source software system based on Samvera technologies that can be used by libraries and archives to provide access to audio and video collections.

At IU, Variations is jointly supported by the IU Digital Library Program and Cook Music Library.
Last Updated 18 November 2021
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