Reed Library Music Collection - Sheet Music Collection

 

Sheet Music Collection

The Sheet Music Collection is a sub-collection within the Music Collection of the Daniel A. Reed Library at the State University of New York at Fredonia. This interesting and colorful collection, given to the library many years ago by an anonymous donor, contains approximately 2,500 folios of sheet music. The collection consists mostly of popular songs and instrumental music, dating from the late 19th-century through the 1950s, with the majority of the pieces being from the 1910s through the 1920s.

Items from this collection are currently being processed and catalogued, with bibliographic records being loaded into Reed Library's online public access catalog. At the same time, these items are being digitized and uploaded into the SUNY DSpace repository, with appropriate metadata being input for each piece. Items from the collection that are in the public domain are available through DSpace as PDFs, with links from Fredonia’s library catalog. The original folios will be kept and preserved in the library’s Archives and Special Collections area.

Many of the items in this collection are either rare, or are unique to this library. The collection is a window into the world of the early twentieth-century, not only from the music itself, but through the beautiful and creative cover art and advertisements within each folio. The depictions of people, costume, and customs, along with the lyrics and music of each song, are a marvelous historical resource for analyzing and understanding the popular culture of those times.

News

4/17/2018 -- 707 sheet music folios have been digitized and entered into the DSpace repository.

c2018 Daniel A. Reed Library, The State University of New York at Fredonia

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