The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is a collection at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the John Hopkins Univeristy. The collection itself has over 29,000 pieces of music and is centered around American music between the years 1780-1960. The music itself was given to John Hopkins as a gift, in which he had created his own cateloguing system and as such, everything was cross indexed when it arrived at the university. Levy wanted to help to increase appreciation in music through his collection.

When first accessing the site, the user is able to select either the browse feature if they just want to browse, or the search feature if the user is only wanting to search whats available. Each piece that is located presents a thumbnail of the scanned sheet, as well as the ability to enlarge the image. Below with each image includes information about the composer, lyricist, publisher, title, instrumentation, the first and last line of the piece, the subject and the call number.

Each of the pieces are arranged by subject, which are then seperated into seperate boxes. In this way, if a user does travel to John Hopkins, the process in locating the piece they are searching for would be realitively easy. Because Levy had is own subject headings, these subject headings are also available on the website to clarify what to what he is referring to.

Another interesting note to this site is an explination as to why some songs are not available for viewing. The project will not put up music that is published after 1923 because it is not in public domain. A text is available, but the music itself is not available. For music published before 1923, the library has a note stating they are willing to make photocopies for a small fee.

The images themselves are a bit blurry and make it difficult to make out any text or notes on the music sheets themselves. Apparently, this only happens on some computers, while on others it is not a problem. It is a problem they are working on. They also state quite clearly that the resolution is not great, but this is all that is available as to any technical aspects of the online collection.

Their selection process was simple- there was none. Everything that was in Levy's collection is shown.

This collection seems to available for general users as well as researchers. The site states that researchers and especially musicologists were using his collection even before it came to the university, so its current location makes it much simplier to access.

Overall, I think this collection is well done. Despite the poor resolution, it seems as though the library is willing to do what is necessary to accomodate their users within the legal bounds.