Introduction to the collection

Sat. May 20, 2006 (Normally I'll try to write these up on the day I complete the hours, but I got a little behind this week...)

Today Brad introduced me to the various parts of the sheet music collection, told me some of the history of how the various parts were acquired, and let me take some time to poke around in the collection on my own to see if I could find a section of it to concentrate on for my project. He also gave me a copy of Ernst Krohn's Music Publishing in St. Louis (completed and edited by J. Bunker Clark, 1988) to look through. Brad also mentioned an article that would be good to read - I'll put the citation here so I don't forget to look for it: Krohn, Ernst. "On classifying sheet music." Notes XXVI/3, March 1970.

This is a quote from Gaylord's Supplementary Catalog information page (http://catalog.wustl.edu:81/screens/libinfo.html):

The Gaylord Sheet Music Collection is an amalgamation of several discrete collections. Most notable are the St. Louis publishers' collection included in the Supplementary Catalog; the part of Ernst Krohn's collection indexed in George Keck's dissertation, Pre-1875 American imprint sheet music in the Ernst C. Krohn Special Collections, Gaylord Music Library, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri : a catalog and descriptive study (1982); the popular song collection indexed by Betty Krause on cards and now part of the Gaylord Card Catalog housed in the Microforms Room (Room 12b); the "green box collection" of vocal and instrumental music, organized by genre and composer and cataloged by collection-level records under composer; and, the Eric P. Newman collection, currently not indexed.

I asked Brad what had been the priorities for cataloging and digitizing thus far, and he said there were three groups of things that had been prioritized thus far and all for different reasons: 1) the St. Louis publishers collection, particularly Balmer (most important 19th c. St. Louis music publisher) - for obvious local interest reasons, 2) the World's Fair material - for programmatic/subject interest during the centennial celebration of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, and 3) the newspaper boxes (newspapers once had pieces of sheet music inserted) - for preservation reasons since many of the pieces were starting to deteriorate.

Krohn had his sheet music collection organized/classified using his own subject terms. The collection, for the most part, is no longer organized this way (though there are a few sections still boxed this way), but the terms are entered in the bibliographic records in the Supplementary Catalog as "Krohn term." Some examples of these terms include Presidents, Patriotic, States, Hawaiian, World War II, St. Louis World's Fair, etc.

The parts of the collection that interested me the most are the World War I boxes (Brad mentioned that a musicology student recent wrote a paper using this part of the sheet music collection, which I think would be quite interesting to read), the St. Louis music publishers, and the Newman collection. In terms of digitization priorities, continuing on with the St. Louis music publishers (especially the Balmer) would make the most sense. They are all cataloged to some extent, though, so the cataloging experience wouldn't come in as much with this part of the collection (though I could still look at cataloging procedures and possible enhancements and other changes...).

The World War I boxes would be interesting, but there are several big World War I sheet music collections already digitized, so there could be quite a bit of unecessary duplication if I chose this portion (or maybe I shouldn't really be concerned about that?). I started to do a spot check of titles we hold with several of the big collections that are already digitized (primarily Brown's World War I Sheet Music Collection - http://dl.lib.brown.edu/sheetmusic/ww1/index.html and Duke's Historic American Sheet Music - http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/) and found some overlap, but I didn't do enough to really be able to make a final decision.

In terms of cataloging experience, doing some of the Newman collection would probably make the most sense. Compared to some of the other parts of the collection as a whole, I don't think this is really seen as a priority for digitization, though.

Maybe I could choose different parts of the collection to work on for different purposes? Maybe that's making things too complicated and being too amibitious..

Hours today: 4
Total hours completed: 4