The Historic Sheet Music Collection

The Music Services Department's Historic Sheet Music Collection is housed in the Douglass Listening Room and consists of over 26,000 pieces of popular sheet music from the 1840's to the 1960's. Access to the whole collection is provided through a printed index available at the Douglass Room Desk. The index includes listings by song title, publisher, composer, lyricist, cover art, subject, as well as chronological groupings by decade.

The collection itself does not circulate, but may be used for research by filling out a request form, available at the Douglass Room Desk.

In order to preserve the Historic Sheet Music Collection, photocopying of pieces from the collection is not permitted. Digital prints of pages from the collection may be requested for items that are in the public domain (pre-1923); the cost for this service starts at $6.00 per item. Patrons may also request permission to take digital pictures of selections from the collection, provided the pieces are in the public domain. Consult Music Services staff for more information.

Access to the digital images of some of the collection is available at the Historic Sheet Music Collection web site. The digital collection currently includes the Oregon Music Collection, as well as a few images from the Women Composers Collection. More images from the Women Composers Collection will be added in the future. Other listings of pieces of music by women composers may also be found at the UO Women Composers Scoreography, arranged by composer.

Future plans include an online database for searching the entire Historic Sheet Music Collection of 26,000 items.

For more information about the physical collection, contact the Music Services Department at 541-346-3079 or e-mail us at musicref@uoregon.edu.

Other digital sheet music resources can be found at the Sheet Music Consortium web site (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/ ). For other Pacific Northwest collections, see the University of Washington's Pacific Northwest Sheet Music Collection web site at http://content.lib.washington.edu/smweb/.

View pdf version of presentation on using the digital sheet music collection or sheet music resource list.

Maintained by: Leslie Bennett, lbennett@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 11/13/2009