The Beethoven in the House project began in 2020 and ran for three years, ending in 2023. Its

purpose was to aid musicologists in the use of digitized resources for research, allowing users

to access and display digital holdings in distant archives, select and comment on musical

objects in the materials, and share their targeted comments with other researchers. The project

resulted in the development of a prototype for an online app that uses Linked Data to provide

support for storing, sharing, and publishing musical commentary along with the exact fragments

of the digital music resources they reference. This tool is a proof of concept for writing editorial

annotations as Linked Open Data, and was funded in part by the Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Projektnummer 429039809.

While we have produced documentation for our data model, and also for our encoding

methodology, user documentation for the online digital application, for which both the model and

the procedures were developed, is still lacking. This is a significant shortcoming, as a lack of

user documentation greatly limits the life of an application beyond the original project, and it can

severely hinder efforts by other researchers to build upon the work accomplished by the

project's development team. Documentation is also essential when a project endeavors to

adhere to FAIR principles for data management. Without documentation, a project cannot truly

claim its data meets the standard for Reusability, nor can it achieve an even reasonable degree

of Accessibility–remaining opaque and out of reach for most anyone who would use it.

The Beethoven in the House project was predicated on the Open Research model promulgated

by the European Commission, and as Beethoven in the House was funded by a grant from the

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, it should naturally adhere to Open Research principles as

much as possible. As of this date, the project's Annotator App has no documentation, and there

are no plans to produce documentation now that the project has ended.This project will remedy this deficiency and provide the clear and comprehensive documentation

required for the completed digital research output to qualify as Open Source, and in addition,

will contribute greatly to the software's sustainability.

Included in this proposal are visual media such as screencasts and videos, innovative means of

delivery for software documentation, and methods that remain seldom used for experimental

software. Not all scholars have the patience to wade through user documentation before

attempting to use an app. The use of videos with clearly marked signposts, can greatly speed

the learning process, increasing accessibility of the app and making it more appealing to

musicologists. Supplementing text documentation with video materials also helps in overcoming

language barriers, an important consideration in a research context that benefits from

international collaboration. The videos will cover not only the application and its features, but

also a demonstration of how it was combined with other tools in the Beethoven in the House

workflow.