In Harmony: Sheet Music From Indiana: A Collaborative Digital Library Project

Abstract

In October 2004, the Indiana University Digital Library Program received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana (see the project website at http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/inharmony/). This is a three-year project to catalog and digitize sheet music from the collections of four partner institutions, Indiana University's Lilly Library, the Indiana State Museum, the Indiana Historical Society, and the Indiana State Library. The purpose of the project is to create an online sheet music collection that will demonstrate how museums and libraries with complementary materials can work cooperatively to create shared digital resources. By concentrating initially on the collections of American sheet music owned by each of the partners, the project will accomplish two highly adaptable goals: 1) it will demonstrate how approximately 10,000 digitized pieces of sheet music and their attendant metadata can be presented on a single website, offering federated searching of all collections or access to one or more selected collections; and 2) it will demonstrate how collaborative digital library development can provide online access to the important regional collections of museums, libraries, and historical societies. These collections may, in fact, be sheet music, or they may be important materials in other formats, such as photographs, maps, manuscripts, or artifacts.