UNT Music Library Virtual Rare Book Room

Just like the previous post, this is a University of North Texas digitization project. The Music Library Virtual Rare Book Room contains scanned images of over a hundred bound-format musical scores, mostly from the 18th c. The digital library includes some materials that were borrowed from private collectors and scanned with their permission. They plan on adding materials to the collection and there is contact information for the Music Librarian at UNT so that website users can suggest items for future inclusion.

The scores can be viewed in PDF and in page-turner format. The Technical page explains PDFs and gives instructions for allowing byte-serving in Adobe Acrobat so users can view the files faster. The digital images for the most part look good, although I did find an illustration in a Don Giovanni score that is much too dark. The Technical also specifies that the images were scanned at 400 dpi using a planetary (I'm guessing this is just another word for overhead) scanner so as not to damage the books.

The metadata for the items in this collection is admirably complete. Users can browse by title or author or search by a variety of fields, including LC subject headings, which here seem to indicate either the genre or the form of a work. Each work is accompanied by a few background paragraphs, a link to the UNT catalog record, a short bibliography, a physical description of the book, including scanned images of the cover, and for operas, a plot summary. There is a glossary of conservation terms provided as a reference for the physical descriptions. I did not know that the technical term for insect debris is frass. Note to the writers of Battlestar Galactica: another faux curse word is yours for the taking.

As someone who has been struggling a lot with technology lately, I really appreciate this project's friendliness toward users who have little or no experience viewing digital objects. I also like that they credit the (mostly library school) students who did all the work in big letters on the about page. We should all be so lucky.