This guide is a far-from-comprehensive starting place for exploring digital archives for music scholarship. Class members are welcome to email me additional resources they found useful!
"ArchiveGrid includes over 7 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,400 archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies."
RISM's catalog is a finding aid for music manuscripts and prints; the online catalog includes Series A/1 and A/II (Music Manuscripts after 1600) and parts of B/1 as well as a list of library sigla. Other components can be found in print in the Orwig Music Library.
Publicly available database of music iconography. Contains descriptions of music and dance-related topics or content with links to online images of artworks.
RIPM indexes music periodicals from 1760-1966, focusing on North American, South American, and European publications. Many entries include full text. It is complemented by RILM for content from 1967 forward.
1945-present; RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals with Full Text is an international, highly annotated database with detailed content analysis of writings on musical history and culture between 1800 and 1950--from Beethoven to Bartok, from Berlioz to Berg, and from Schubert to Shostakovich--all provided by internationally-recognized scholars and editors. RIPM currently indexes the contents of 120 music periodicals including articles, reviews, illustrations, music examples, advertisements, press reviews, and more. In addition, RIPM offers more than 5,000 English-language translations of articles from journals in other languages.Search RILM and RIPM together.
Provides access to 105 rare, full text jazz periodicals consisting initially of American publications, 1914-2006.
1914 to 2006; RIPM Jazz debuts with 105 rare, full text periodicals consisting initially of American (U. S.) publications. Forthcoming updates will include periodicals published in Europe and Canada.
Search, browse, or upload contributions to the scholarly record at Brown.
The Brown Digital Repository (BDR) is a place to gather, index, store, preserve, and make available digital assets produced via the scholarly, instructional, research, and administrative activities at Brown. Includes all of the collections in the Center for Digital Scholarship.
Discover millions of books, journals, images and maps digitized from libraries around the world, current.
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of book and ejournal titles digitized from libraries around the world. As members of HathiTrust, Brown users get PDF download access to nearly 3 million public domain or permissioned works that were a part of the Google Books digitization projects, or were contributed to the trust by other member institutions.
To login, click the LOGIN BUTTON and select Brown University from the list of institutions. If you have not already authenticated with your Brown username and password, you will then be asked to do so. While you can read articles without logging in, you will NOT be able to download articles.
"The Music Division is dedicated to continually increasing online access to its unique collection material through its digital collections. Through these digital collections, researchers are able to download scans of an incredible array of materials ranging from Medieval chant manuscripts, to manuscript and first edition scores by the most revered composers of the classical music canon, to tens of thousands of pieces of historic sheet music in the public domain. It should be noted, however, that digital collections represent a small percentage of the Music Division’s complete holdings; contact music reference librarians to learn more about the onsite collection material that relates to these digital collections."
The National Jukebox is a project to digitize a part of the Library of Congress's holdings in early sound recordings. From their website: "the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others."
"The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Grammy Foundation and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free. "
From the About page: "The Global Jukebox is presented as a free, non-commercial, educational place...to explore expressive patterns in...cultural-geographic and diasporic settings and alongside other people’s. By inviting familiarity with many kinds of vocalizing, musicking, moving, and talking, we hope to advance cultural equity and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage....The Global Jukebox makes available to the general public, scholars and scientists all of the data and many of the analyses of the research into the expressive arts carried out under the direction of Alan Lomax and the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg from 1960 to 1995 at Columbia University and Hunter College/CUNY."
A comprehensive resource for visual anthropology, provides access to more than 2,000 hours of film, including raw field footage, crafted ethnographies, and documentaries.
Intended to be a visual encyclopedia of human behavior and culture, online in streaming video. Contains classic and contemporary documentaries; previously unpublished footage from working anthropologists and ethnographers in the field; and select feature films. International in scope and thematic areas include: language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, and sex, gender, and family roles.
Provides streaming audio, video, and critical commentary from performance practitioners past and-present, current.
Current; the Routledge Performance Archive provides access to audio-visual material from past and-present practitioners of performance across a range of fifty years. Materials included encompass interviews with important figures from theater and performance history, practitioner footage, masterclasses, contemporary productions, and documentaries. New material is added every three months.
"A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites."
This link opens in a new window
