Music Library Association Conference 2019

This poster will present the results of a cross-institutional project, Resounding the Archives, funded by a state grant to encourage collaboration among its research universities. The project aims to make World War I era music more accessible by working across institutions to digitize archival sheet music, perform, record, and present these materials. In partnership with two other schools, we used this grant as an opportunity to involve students in three aspects of providing enhanced accessibility for non-musicians to interrogate the past through musical artifacts.

At our institution, an undergraduate music seminar enabled students with different levels of facility with notated music to develop a research project around a piece of sheet music from our World War I archival collection. Students at another school used digital surrogates to prepare a public performance and to record the pieces. Other collaborators, using expertise from a recent exhibition, developed a multimedia website to present the public-domain images, transcriptions, and recordings for public use. All three schools collaborated on a symposium to bring the project together.

The poster will describe the scope of the grant, the design of the class, and our involvement as collaborators.