Thursday, March 17, 2011

Music Treasures Consortium

The Library of Congress has launched a Music Consortium Treasures website that gives online access to some of the world's most valued music manuscript and print materials from six esteemed institutions HERE.

The aim of the site is to further music scholarship and research by providing access in one place to digital images of primary sources for performance and study of music.

The Music Treasures Consortium website is the creation of the music libraries and archives in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Joining the Library are The Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace Library, the British Library, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University, the Morgan Library and Museum and the New York Public Library.

Items digitized include manuscript scores and first and early editions of a work. Seminal composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Georges Bizet, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, among others, are represented on the site through their original handwritten manuscripts and first editions. The online items range from the 16th century to the 20th century in this initial launch.

Researchers can search or browse materials, access bibliographic information about each item and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive's website. The site will continue to grow as consortium members add more items.