Abstract

In recent years, the concept of “records” has expanded beyond institution-centered discourse to encompass personal life and cultural experience. This study begins with the recognition that records easily discarded and forgotten can be captured as ephemera, and seeks to restore the fragmented and disappearing contexts of performing arts records in the digital environment. As the first step toward establishing a digital performing arts ephemera archive, this research aims to design and validate a faceted metadata schema for musical performances that restores the contextual value of ephemera and enables their integrated management. To this end, the study examines the characteristics of digital ephemera and the structural features of performing arts data, and analyzes major music ontologies to derive eight key facets—Work, Movement/Sub Work, Person, Group, Performance, Ephemera, Textual Media, and Recorded Media. The Performance facet is positioned as the central hub of information organization, interconnecting all entities through unique identifiers. Two case studies were conducted: a Work-centric analysis of Debussy’s Clair de Lune and an Ephemera-centric analysis based on a recital poster. The results demonstrate that the proposed classification system effectively reconstructs the holistic context of performances from fragmented records, reduces data redundancy, and supports multidimensional retrieval. Moreover, through standardized structures and identifier systems, it ensures interoperability and scalability, suggesting applicability not only to other musical genres such as K-POP and Korean traditional music but also to broader performing arts—including exhibitions, musicals, and plays—and to other time- and context-based fields such as sports events and academic conferences.