Binders Volumes Research Initiative

FAIN: PW-290538-23

University of North Texas (Denton, TX 76203-5017)
Maristella Johanna Feustle (Project Director: July 2022 to present)
Candace Bailey (Co Project Director: March 2023 to present)

The creation of a cross-institutional digital collection of binders volumes by establishing a new metadata schema, piloting the digitization of 10 binder’s volumes, and integrating the catalog records of over 400 more volumes.

This Foundations project addresses the needs of the growing area of research in music binders volumes. These volumes contain published sheet music that people (primarily women) across the U.S. compiled according to their preferences. They attract multidisciplinary research on the intersecting musical, social, and cultural contexts present in a given volume. This research also challenges second-hand narratives of American music in the 1800s via actual artifacts of social participation in music, restoring the perspectives of women to an often male-dominated discourse and enriching the re-evaluation of conventional narratives. Many "lost" works also await discovery, as volumes often contain rare or unique titles. This important and growing area of scholarly work finds roadblocks in discoverability, physical and digital preservation, and access. This proposal thus envisions a pilot project for a cross-institutional, extensible digital collection linked to a searchable database.