Turn-of-the-Century Sheet Music (Music Library)

N.B.: this project became the Longfellow sheet music project

About the Project

Working name: Sheet Music
Sponsors: Sarah Canino, Sabrina Pape
Duration: TBD
Nature:
[Text; image; text+image; GIS; audio/video; other]
Images, text, possibly audio (see “specialized software”)
Project track:
Date prepared: November 10, 2011
Project status: Proposed

Background / Purpose

From Sarah Canino’s proposal:

This collection includes popular sheet music from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s and includes about 2,000 items of about 3-5 pages each.  Many have the “decorative” title pages and many have been listed in a FileMaker Pro database.

This collection could be a good choice because there is interest not only to scholars focusing on music, but also those interested in visual images of the period and textual representations of inventions (telephone, airplane), events (elections, wars, fairs, etc.) and depictions of race, gender, and ethnicity (in particular African American, Native American, women, Jews.   For example, Peter Antelyes drew upon these for shared imagery and text depictions of American Indians and Jews.  Even though our collection is relatively small, we may have unique items.

Other schools have done quite a bit with their collections and LC has also included sheet music in its American memory project:
See http://library.duke.edu/music/sheetmusic/collections.html for a selective list.

Other thoughts (from Joanna):

If we are able to get high-quality TIFFs in this process, we could try to use software that uses Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to make a sheet music “transcript” — see http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/84.

Scope

Phases of project
Based on item temporal coverage
Phase 1: Digitize pre-1900 itemsPhase 2: Digitize 1900-present, checking for copyright issues

Phase 3: Explore OMR

Number of items to be digitized Approx. 2,000
Total number of images
Assumption: one JPG derivative per each archival image created
Approx. 3-5 pages per item, for totals of 6000-10,000 images
Total number of records
Special considerations Estimates for space needed will vary widely depending on size of items, color depth for certain pages versus all-text pages (if any).

Location of Physical Items

 

Units Location
Music Library

 

Hardware/Storage

System type System Space required
Archival image storage
Derivative item storage
TOTAL SPACE NEEDED

Software

Image capture: TBD
Metadata capture and storage: FileMaker database already created, unsure depth of metadata
Final product display:

File Naming Convention

Formula

  • Prefix: msheet
  • ID: 4-digit, string pad left with zeroes, based on FMP item primary key
  • ID part: 3-digit based, string pad left with zeroes, based on order of pages
  • Delimiter: underscore