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.
Return to Historic American Sheet Music