Sibley Music Library Awarded NEH Grant to Continue Digitization Program

Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Award of $300,000 to support its continuing efforts to digitize music scores in the public domain.

This is the second NEH grant that the Library has received for the project, which provides free online access to rare and unique scores that are no longer protected by copyright, are not widely held by other libraries, and are not digitized elsewhere. The 2009 award resulted in the digitization of 9,600 public domain scores, a total of 303,000 pages of digitized music.

The Library's scores digitization program has become an important source of music for scholars and musicians around the world. To date, Sibley Music Library has digitized more than 11,000 public domain scores and books, accounting for more than three million downloads from the University of Rochester's Digital Repository "UR Research" (https://urresearch.rochester.edu).

"We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a second award supporting our music scores digitization program," says Daniel Zager, Associate Dean and Head Librarian of the Sibley Music Library, "Our work in digitization permits us to share our riches in public domain printed scores on a global level, thus bringing the power of the Eastman School of Music to the broader musical world in yet another way."