Message-Id: <199905131611.JAA17810@dns.ccit.arizona.edu> Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 12:16:55 -0400 From: Tamara Swora-Gober <mailto:tswo@LOC.GOV> Subject: LC National Digital Library announces release of Duke Univ Sheet To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
From: mailto:ndlpcoll@loc.govThe 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