The materials in "We'll Sing to Abe Our Song!": Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana were scanned at 300 dpi on a variety of capture devices.
Covers were captured as grayscale or color images with either a UMAX Mirage IIse flatbed scanner or a 4-by-5-inch camera with a Phase One digital back.
Interior pages were captured as bitonal digital images using a Bookeye overhead capture device. The decision to capture the interior pages as bitonal images resulted from a usability survey that compared the quality of printouts. The survey determined that printing from bitonal images resulted in clearer copies than printing from grayscale. Because the music in the collection is meant to be performed, the clarity of printed copies was a significant factor in determining the format of collection image files.
The collection offers electronic transcriptions of all lyrics. The lyrics were transcribed at the Library of Congress and tagged in HTML for online display.