Tuesday 15 May 2012

What's the score: crowd sourcing and popular Victorian music at the Bodleian Library

What's the score is the Bodleian's first crowd-sourcing project and aims to engage the public in helping to make accessible a collection of Victorian popular piano music which was received by the Library under legal deposit but never catalogued.  No particular expertise is required to transcribe the information from digitised images of the scores.  Developed in partnership with Zooniverse, the site is now live and has its own blog.  While this project is concerned with complete scores, the bonus to ephemerists is that it surfaces thousands of Victorian music covers.  The digital images can be browsed and the data collected will eventually improve the searchability of the collection.  The project is on Twitter: @whatscore

 

























































(C) Bodleian Libraries
The Music Titles (covers only)  in the John Johnson Collection are catalogued. The records are available through the online catalogue.  Records and images are in ProQuest's The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera.

The Bodleian also has a fine collection of popular music and music hall songs which form a major part of the Harding Collection. These are in the Bodleian's online catalogue SOLO (no images). Abigail Williams' recent Radio 3 broadcast about Walter Harding is still available.

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