American Vernacular Music Manuscripts

Monday, July 6, 2015

We received the following announcement from AMS-Announce:

Center for Popular Music Launches American Music Manuscripts Website

The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University announces the launch of its American Vernacular Music Manuscripts (AVMM) website. Built as part of a three-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and undertaken in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society, the AVMM site makes available for the first time hundreds of American music manuscripts from the 1730s to 1910.

The complementary collections of the Center for Popular Music and the American Antiquarian Society are among the largest and most significant holdings of such material in the nation. Approximately 350 unique, handwritten manuscripts were included in the project, totaling more than 17,000 pages of music.

The manuscripts were all scanned in high resolution to archival standards for preservation, with the images stored at the Internet Archive. The AVMM website serves as a front page and search engine for the images, where users can search by year, song title, subject, origin, creator, and keyword. In addition, all of the project manuscripts were cataloged in MARC library format, making them accessible through WorldCat, and a set of guidelines was created to allow other institutions to catalog similar manuscripts in their collections.

For more information, please visit the AVMM website.

Category: Electronic resources