The Juilliard Manuscript Collection

This week I looked at the Juilliard Manuscript Collection.

Selection Criteria
There are no selection criteria as such for the Juilliard Manuscript Collection comprises just 138 items, donated to the school by Juilliard Board Chairman Bruce Kovner in February of 2006. These include autograph manuscripts, sketches, engravers' proofs, and first editions by such composers as Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy, all the big guys. As of right now, most of the items have been digitized, with plans for all to be, eventually. Currently the only way to view the items are through this digital portal; the physical collection is going to be housed in a new scholars' reading room which is slated to open in February of 2009 and until then the collection is not available to the public.

Object Characteristics & Metadata
The interface is very slick interface, requiring Flash,The main document listing the entire collection is in the .swf (Shockwave Flash) file format, which allows easy zooming, searching, page jumping, etc. Within this document each item in the collection is listed alphabetically by composer, with the title and a brief description following. For a search without using the main document, one chooses the composer, then chooses the specific piece, and a thumbnail of the digitized sheet music appears at the bottom. When you click on 'view this work', you can zoom in to very great detail, and the yellowing and mottling of the paper has been retained, and the blank sheets that follow the written-on sheets have been digitized as well. Each page is saved with a unique, easily comprehensible file name, but since you can't download or print or in any other way save the item, this is of less use than it could be. While the website is quite fancy, it's pretty inflexible. For example, one can only search by composer, not by date or type of material (sketches vs. first editions, etc.) or type of music, or any other feature. One could search for those particular words within the .swf document, but that's not a sureshot approach. Note: It *is* pretty fascinating to be able to see the drawings that these famous composers doodled into the margins of their works.

On the home page they gratefully acknowledge several copyright holders.

Audience
Performers and music scholars are the stated audiences for this collection, and I believe that scholars of historical book binding book design would also be interested in this, since so much care was given to digitizing -- in full color -- every page.