LC National Digital Library announces release of Duke Univ Sheet Music collection

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

From:  ndlpcoll@xxxxxxx

The Library of Congress National Digital Library and the Ameritech
Competition announce the release of the Historic American Sheet Music
collection from Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library.  This is the fourth collection from  the
LC/Ameritech competition to come online.  The collection can be found at
the following URL:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ncdhtml/hasmhome.html 

The Historic American Sheet Music collection presents 3,042 pieces of
sheet music (16,600 images) drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and
Special Collections Library at Duke University, which holds an
important, representative, and comprehensive collection of nineteenth
and early twentieth century American sheet music.  This selection
presents a significant perspective on American history and culture
through a variety of music types including bel canto, minstrel songs,
protest songs, sentimental songs, patriotic and political songs,
plantation songs, spirituals, dance music, songs from vaudeville and
musicals, "Tin pan alley" songs, and songs from World War I.  The
collection is particularly strong in antebellum Southern music,
Confederate imprints, and Civil War songs and music.  Also included are
piano music of marches, variations, opera excerpts, and dance music,
including waltzes, quadrilles, polkas, etc.  Cover illustrations
represent an important, and in some cases almost unique, source of
information for popular contemporary ideas on politics, patriotism,
race, religion, love, and sentiment.

The American Memory site also includes a companion collection from the
Library of Congress Music Division entitled, Music for the Nation,
American Sheet Music, 1870-1885.  The first release of this collection
appeared last year (22,000 items, 150,000 images).  It is being scanned
from 35mm microfilm and is a comprehensive collection of sheet music
registered for copyright in the post-Civil War era.  The URL is:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/smhtml/smhome.html

For the Duke collection, the digital reproductions of the sheet music
are mounted at Duke.  The music was scanned in color from originals. 
HTML page-turning "wrappers" were created automatically in a batch using
a perl script.  This is in contrast to the page-turning approach used by
the Library of Congress, where small page-turning datasets are created
for each item (also in batches using scripts), and the HTML display is
generated dynamically from the dataset.

The collection was released at Duke as part of the Digital Scriptorium  
  [ http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/scriptorium/ 
    http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/   ]
in late 1998.  At Duke, finding aids, marked up in SGML according to the
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) DTD, with very detailed descriptive
information for each piece of music, are indexed and presented on the
web for searching using DynaWeb software.  Copies of the finding aids
were delivered to the Library of Congress, where they were converted to
a form that could be easily incorporated into American Memory allowing
searching within this collection or across all collections using the
Library's InQuery search engine.  Both search interfaces generate
bibliographic displays from which a click on the image of the cover
links to the corresponding page-turning wrapper at Duke.

For an example of cross-collection searching in American Memory that
retrieves some of this sheet music with some other treasures, try
searching from
  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mdbquery.html
for 
    webster daniel      [consider choosing the "match exact phrase" option
 or
    quadrille

For additional information about this project please visit the page
announcing Duke's award which can be found at
http://memory.loc.gov:8081/ammem/award/97award/duke.html 

For information about the LC/Ameritech competition please visit the
competition home page which can be found at
http://memory.loc.gov:8081/ammem/award/index.html