Spencer Collection of American Sheet Music

The Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Sheet Music at Baylor University has about 30,000 titles including the first editions of Jingle Bells and Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Selection Decisions:

Baylor acquired the lifetime collection from Frances Spencer in 1965. Currently 934 titles are available to search or browse. The information that describes the collection is limited in its usefulness because it says the collection is organized into over 200 categories for browsing. That is clearly not the case on the digital collection so they must mean the physical collection. So that raises the question of how much/many of those categories are represented on this site and makes me wonder why they didn’t categorize the 934 titles in any way. It would make it easier for the user to get a sense of the selection decisions they made. There are a lot of compositions by/art depicting African Americans. It’s not clear whether this was an original collecting focus of Spencer or whether Baylor has selected out these titles to digitize.

Metadata:

Each page of each book of sheet music has a unique ID and there is a cool option to display the reference URL from any individual page on the site and get a persistent-linking URL that can be emailed or saved for later use. The 934 titles are numbered and show the title on the main browse page. At the item level view, each page is numbered. Although it’s easy to see who the composer is because they are high-quality images and the composer is generally shown, composer information is not called out in a summary field. Neither is date, publisher, or any other metadata info. Some of the objects are full-text searchable and they are all searchable by composer since composer information has been attached to each object (which you see only on the search results page).

Object Characteristics:

This collection was created using CONTENTdm and displays zoomable thumbnails in a familiar interface. Each object can be zoomed to 100% and panned. Each image is a tiff file. Some of the images have full text views which much have been hand-keyed because, as we learned last week, OCRing old sheet music is no cakewalk. Each object can be rotated and has the interesting ability to “clip” a portion of the image, which really amounts to selecting a portion of the image that will open automatically in a new window.

Audience:

Music historians and archivists would find this collection fascinating and useful. It’s fun for anyone with a general interest in music or art. African American/Cultural scholars would also find a lot of material here.