Digital Scriptorium.

STROH, PATRICIA ELLIOTT

Digital Scriptorium. Duke University. Paul Mangiafico, director; Stephen Miller, Lynn Pritcher, digital encoding archivists. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/scriptorium.

The Digital Scriptorium consists of finding aids, exhibit guides, and digitized resources from the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. Music-related Scriptorium projects and additional Web-based music resources can also be accessed through the music library's Web site, http://www.lib.duke.edu/music. In the Scriptorium, fifteen projects are currently available online, and another two are in progress. The major music-related projects are the Historical American Sheet Music Project and "Still Going On: An Exhibit Celebrating the Life and Times of William Grant Still."

Managed by Stephen D. Miller, the Historical American Sheet Music Project (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic) won a well-deserved LC/Ameritech award in 1996/97 and is now part of the American Memory Project sponsored by the Library of Congress. The searchable database gives ready access to over three thousand pieces of sheet music published in the United States between 1850 and 1920. Users may browse the collection by decade or by viewing thumbnail graphics of title pages. Browsing is also possible by subject (including genres, such as "fox trots" and "state songs"), cover illustration type, and even advertising. Each subject category offers the option of seeing an example or description of the genre. The nature of the material necessitates inclusion of "legacies of racism and discrimination" as a category, with a warning regarding their potentially offensive messages. The illustration categories range from animals to "weather and geological events." A pull-down menu provides keyword searching in a variety of indexes, including publisher, date, lithographer, first line, and refrain in addition to the standard composer, title, and lyricist indexes. A search on the word "dream" in the refrain index, which retrieved eleven hits, demonstrated the speed and friendly design of this sophisticated search engine. On selecting a specific title, scanned color images of the cover page and bibliographical information are quickly downloaded, showing the keyword used for retrieval in large red type. From this page the user may select high-quality images of each page of music, which can be reduced or enlarged. The sheet music database is easily navigable and works flawlessly, lacking only a few sample sound files to improve its attractiveness. The site also includes a timeline of representative pieces and a short essay about sheet music, with a glossary of terms, a bibliography, list of additional reference resources, and links to related Web sites. Particularly valuable for those of us planning similar projects are th e FAQ and technical-information pages, which include specifications for scanning, resolution of technical difficulties, and a procedural manual. For sheet music from Duke's collection not yet included in the Historical American Sheet Music Project, the music library Web page provides the Sheet Music and American Song Lyrics pages maintained by Lois Schulz. This supplemental site includes a database for searching lyrics and titles in the uncataloged collections, and some sample images.

The William Grant Still exhibit is an example of one of the multimedia guides in the Scriptorium (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sgo). A joint venture of Duke and Saint Augustine's College, the Still project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A pioneer as a composer and musician, Still (1895-1978) was the first African American to have a symphony performed by an American orchestra--one of his several notable achievements. The exhibit displays photographs of Still, his family and pets, his performing groups, and images from his music manuscripts, diaries, and letters, with short biographical sketches. Short excerpts of some of his works--including the four movements of his Afro-American Symphony, his theme song for the 1939 New York World's Fair, and other compositions--may be downloaded and played through the computer's sound system. I found this to be a bit frustrating, as the excerpts are so brief the exercise hardly seemed worthwhile. Also disappointing were some of the digitized im ages, particularly the newspaper clippings and correspondence. Although the images download quickly, their poor quality and minuscule size rendered them almost impossible to read. A pagination guide showing the total number of pages in the exhibit also would have been welcome. Although the introductory page offers a navigation menu, those who choose to view the exhibit from the beginning are given no indication of its extent. Supplementing the exhibit is a timeline on Still's contemporaries, with hyperlinks to sentence-long biographical entries on selected names and a few images and sound files. A finding aid for the Still collection, prepared by Lois Schulz, offers a series listing with further description and analysis of the contents of the letters. Gary R. Boye prepared the bibliography and discography.

Another exhibit guide with some music content is for the Guido Mazzoni collection of over forty-nine thousand pamphlets, small volumes, librettos, newspapers, periodicals, and clippings from Italy and Europe from the first half of the twentieth century (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mazzoni/exhibit). Although the item-level database is not yet available on the Web, the exhibit guide offers a taste of what is in the collection, including 471 librettos and a small subcollection on historical musicology.

Keyword searches of the entire Scriptorium server are possible through Webinator. The search engine for browsing all finding aids at Duke is Dynaweb, which translates Encoded Archival Description SGML into browser-compatible HTML (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/findaids). The result is an impressively powerful search tool that retrieves previously hidden or obscure archival resources. A scope and contents search on "music" using Dynaweb pulled up thirty-three hits in the finding aids, exclusive of the William Grant Still page. These keyword searches are great fun and could spark interest in new avenues of research. My search located collections containing music experiments in parapsychology laboratory records; correspondence from 1862 to 1865 by a Confederate soldier who was director of music at the Salem Female Academy; and the papers of musicologist Jane L. Berdes, whose research focused on the ospedali grandi, Venetian welfare institutions that provided musical training for girls and women. The search al so retrieved items from Ad*Access, the Scriptorium's latest addition (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/addaccess). This image database of over seven thousand advertisements from U.S. magazines and newspapers printed from 1911 to 1955 is organized into five categories: beauty and hygiene, radio, television, transportation, and World War II. Those interested in advertisements for war-era phonographs and radios will welcome this database.

The Dynaweb platform displays the finding aid in three frames, with the option to restructure the page for frame-resistant browsers. The left frame shows the table of contents, which encompasses a descriptive summary of the collection, administrative information, a biographical note, a scope and content note, local catalog headings, and series and container lists. Each of these sections may be expanded to reveal sub-files. The selected contents are displayed in the right frame, and a button bar for navigation appears at the bottom. With its effective search capabilities, well-designed display, and significant content, Duke's Scriptorium models some of the most impressive developments in digitized archives to date.

Additional music-related finding aids are found on the music library's Web page. There is a description and index for the Sunny Burke collection, which includes charts for big-band arrangements. An experimental database of printed tablatures for plucked-string instruments from the sixteenth century, compiled by Gary R. Boye, is also available. The catalog appears in three arrangements: by date, by composer, and by printer, with hypertext links to related documents. A related page lists all the tablature documents available in microform at Duke. Finally, though not an archival finding aid, the DW3 Classical Music Resources page warrants mention. It is prominently billed on the music library's Web page as "The World's Most Comprehensive Collection of Classical Music Links" (http://www.lib.duke.edu/music/resources/classical_index.html). This site, meticulously maintained by Yale Fineman, lists composer biographies, chronologies and necrologies, nationally and regionally oriented pages, organizations and centers for scholarly research, electronic journals and newsletters, genre-specific pages, and databases. A simple but powerful search engine readily retrieves Web pages on more refined topics.