Indiana University

Indiana University Libraries, with the Indiana State Museum, the Indiana Historical Society, and the Indiana State Library, will create an online sheet music collection showing 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, it will (1) demonstrate how materials and their attendant metadata--in this case, approximately 10,000 digitized pieces of sheet music and the information used to describe them--can be presented on a single Web site, offering federated searching of all collections or access to one or more selected collections; and (2) show how collaborative digital library development can provide online access to the important regional collections of museums, libraries, and historical societies. These collections may be sheet music; important materials in other formats, such as photographs, maps, manuscripts; or artifacts. This project will be the first library/museum partnership to digitize and create metadata for sheet music.