How to Find Your Snooky Ookums: A Guide to the Irving Berlin Collection

The Music Division regularly offers new and updated online finding aids to help guide the intrepid researcher through its vast collections. You can see an index of all the Music Division’s finding aids here. This month’s new additions include a guide to the papers of Edward Jablonski, author of Irving Berlin: American Troubadour and other composer biographies, as well as a guide to the music and papers of one of the iconic American songwriters.

“God bless America” and “White Christmas” alone would make any songwriter’s career, but those are just two of the most popular of Irving Berlin’s more than 800 compositions. The Irving Berlin Collection amounts to a staggering three-quarters of a million items, with nearly a thousand containers that span 400 linear shelf feet. View the finding aid for the Irving Berlin Collection here. Read more about the great composer on a previous In the Muse post, and listen to one of the dozens of recordings of Berlin’s songs in the National Jukebox.

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