Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

Building the Digital Collection

The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library of Duke University received an award in the 1996/97 round of the Library of Congress / Ameritech National Digital Library Competition to support the digitization of this collection of sheet music. As encouraged by the guidelines, the image files and most of the web pages describing the source collection and the project are mounted and maintained at Duke University as part of the Digital Scriptorium.* Finding aids were delivered to the Library of Congress for indexing as part of American Memory. The finding aids include links to page-turning presentations at Duke university.

For more detail on different aspects of building this digital collection, follow the links below. Links marked * are to pages mounted at Duke University.

• Digitizing the Collection
  The sheet music was scanned on flat-bed scanners in Duke University's Digital Scriptorium at a resolution chosen to support screen display and printing on laser printers. To assemble the pages for a piece of music into an online presentation of the entire piece, an automated script was used to generate a group of web pages that serve as a page-turning "wrapper." For a full discussion of the creation of these digital reproductions, including details of equipment, operational guidelines, and quality control procedures, see Creation of the Images and Database.*

• Intellectual Access to the Collection
  Detailed bibliographic information was recorded for each piece of music, using an indexing template.* Subject terms were assigned to the music content, the illustrations, and to the advertising. Terms were chosen from a Glossary of Sheet Music Terms * developed specifically for the Historic American Sheet Music project and from several established thesauri. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) were used to describe the music content. Terms from the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (LCTGM) and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) were assigned to illustrations.

  For additional information on the policies and procedures used by Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library for selecting and indexing the sheet music, see Selection, Indexing, and Access.*

• Interoperability between the Library of Congress and Duke University
  Duke University incorporated the descriptions for each item into seven finding aids, one for each decade represented. The finding aids are mounted and indexed using DynaWeb at Duke to present the Historic American Sheet Music collection as part of the Digital Scriptorium,* which supports very targeted searching by fields specific to sheet music and this collection. Copies of the finding aids were delivered to the Library of Congress, where they have been indexed with InQuery to allow full integration into American Memory. The search interfaces for the Digital Scriptorium and American Memory offer different search capabilities and display the bibliographic descriptions for the sheet music differently. However, the descriptions in both systems link to the same digital reproduction. In each case, a click on the image of the title page retrieves a presentation of the entire piece of music through the page-turning wrapper stored at Duke University.