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Ebrary Online Sheet Music.

Article Excerpt
Ebrary Online Sheet Music. Published by ebrary, Inc. [Requires Web browser, Internet connection, free downloadable ebrary Reader software (for requirements for the Reader, see http://site.ebrary.com/lib/anysite/support/2_support01.jsp#000) Pricing: 20 cents per FTE, with a minimum fee of $3,000 per year. Ebrary is also open to consortial pricing arrangements.

Ebrary's Online Sheet Music collection represents an early attempt to provide digitized scores as a subscription package to libraries. Sales calls and mailings to my inbox from online score vendors seem to have lagged behind those from the many digital audio packages, image collections, full-text databases, and digital video streams now available. Of course, nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular sheet music is available in abundance at no cost via the Internet, and some institutions offer a sampling of public domain Western art music scores on their Web sites. Overall though, the educational market for subscription-based digital scores seems to remain relatively untapped at this writing.

The primary advantage of ebrary's scores is the convenience factor. Patrons who frequently find themselves in last-minute need of a basic score by a canonic Western composer may stand to benefit most. There are, however, several aspects of ebrary's score collection that need improvement. Little investigation of ebrary's products is required to reveal that scores have not received nearly the attention that books have received in the areas of metadata, search and browse functionalities, study tools (called Info Tools), and presentation. As a result, the scores appear as a loosely tethered add-on to ebrary's robust e-book collection.

Content

Containing "over 9,000 titles," ebrary's Online Sheet Music collection comprises Western classical music scores taken directly from Theodore Presser's CD Sheet Music series, and twentieth-century popular sheet music from Duke University, referred to by ebrary as the "Americana" collection (http://www.ebrary.com/corp/collateral/en/Sheet_Music/ebrary_Sheet_Music.pdf). The original sources of the CD Sheet Music materials are "out-of-copyright standard editions from publishers such as Breitkopf and Hartel, C. F. Peters, G. Schirmer, Carl Fischer, G. Ricordi, Durand and many...

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