Digitizing Public Domain Musical Scores and Books from the Sibley Music Library

FAIN: PW-50753-11

University of Rochester (Rochester, NY 14627-0001)
James Farrington (Project Director: July 2010 to August 2013)

The digitization of 10,000 to 12,000 public domain musical scores and books selected from the collections of the Sibley Music Library and documenting musical composition, performance, and scholarship from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The principal goal of this project is to provide free online access to approximately 10-12,000 uncommon, public domain (PD) musical scores and books selected from the collections of the Sibley Music Library (SML) at the Eastman School of Music (ESM). Our plan is to digitize these materials and make them freely available from the University of Rochester's Digital Repository, UR Research (http://urresearch.rochester.edu). The materials on which this project will concentrate are not in Rare Books, but instead from the riches in the circulating collections of scores and books, selected from a list of 26,000 possible titles that have not been digitized in other mass digitization projects and are otherwise not common titles. In the past five years we have digitized over 7,000 items: scores, books, periodicals, theses, and research papers, including nearly 4,000 items just in the past year thanks to a current NEH-funded project (grant number PW-50288-09). These represent only 67% of the di