LC National Digital Library Program announces release of Stern Sheet Music Collection

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted
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The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the Rare
Book and Special Collections Division announce the release of  "We'll
Sing to Abe Our Song!:  Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation and the
Civil War? from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana.  The
collection is at the American Memory website:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/scsmhtml/scsmhome.html

The collection includes more than two hundred compositions that
represent Lincoln and the war as reflected in popular music.  The
collection spans the years from Lincoln's campaign for president in 1859
through the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909.  This sheet music is
part of a collection of Lincoln-related materials given to the Library
in 1953 by Alfred Whital Stern.  The Stern Collection is widely regarded
as the greatest collection of Lincolniana assembled by a private individual.

This addition to Mr. Lincoln's Virtual Library
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml
includes songs that show Lincoln's popularity, or lack thereof, during
his campaigns, the Civil War, and after his death.  Other public figures
represented in the songs are Frederick Douglass, Ulysses Grant, Andrew
Johnson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee.  The collection also
highlights some of the advances in printing techniques, such as color
lithography, that developed during this fifty-year period.  It also
documents some of the changes in commercial advertising during this era,
such as the use of the blank pages in printed sheet music for printing
music-company catalogs.

Decades before the invention of radio and television, sheet music was a
means of expressing popular attitudes toward public figures and current
events.  The sheet music collected by Alfred Whital Stern provides a
unique and valuable view of one of our greatest presidents, as well as a
few tunes to hum.

The materials in this collection are available for downloading not only
in JPEG format but also as GIF and archival TIFF files.  Having a
variety of image files available allows for the creation of
high-resolution copies that can be easily printed for use in musical performances.

Digitizing the Collection
The materials in "We'll Sing to Abe Our Song!" were scanned at 300 dpi
on a variety of capture devices.  Covers were captured as grayscale or
color images using a UMAX Mirage IIse flatbed scanner or a 4-by-5 camera
with a Phase One digital back.  Interior pages were captured as bitonal
digital images using a Bookeye overhead capture device.  The decision to
capture the interior pages as bitonal images resulted from a usability
survey that compared the quality of printouts.  The survey determined
that printing from bitonal images resulted in clearer copies than
printing from grayscale.  Because the music in the collection is meant
to be performed, the clarity of printed copies was a significant factor
in determining the format of collection image files.

The collection offers electronic transcriptions of all lyrics. The
lyrics were transcribed at the Library of Congress and tagged in HTML
for online display.

Please direct any questions about this collection to NDLPCOLL@xxxxxxx