Digital scores

As many of you know, Sibley began digitizing scores that are in the Public Domain (that is, there are no copyright restrictions) several years ago. We make them available in the University's digital repository, UR Research. Within the repository, Sibley has a "community" (the ESM Theory Department also has a recently-instituted community). Within the community, we have--so far--three collections:

Musical Scores
ESM Theses and Dissertations
DMA Papers

The latter two collections will be the subject of a later post. The Musical Scores collection, however, is worth a post of its own. It is the single most used collection in the university's digital repository. Although having less than 40% of the repository's total objects, it accounts for 80% of all downloads from the repository. Since statistics started to be gathered in early 2005, there have been over 1.1 million downloads* from the approximately 2600 titles that have been put in Musical Scores.

Although it is titled Musical Scores, it also contains whatever books and periodicals we have digitized. There haven't been many of these, but some of those that have been digitized are pretty interesting, including:

The Black Hercules, or The adventures of a banjo player (1884)
S.S. Stewart’s banjo and guitar journal, of which we have a nearly complete run from 1884-1900
Piobaireachd, its origin and construction (1915) by John Grant, on the bagpipe
A history of music for the use of young students (1879) by W. S. Rockstro

The repository is indexed by all of the search engines (e.g. Google), and we also make links from Voyager and Worldcat (OCLC).

*A download in this context is anytime someone clicks on the pdf link and views the score, not just simply page views of the metadata.