Music for the Nation contains scanned page images for “more than 62,500 pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright” from 1820‐1860 and from 1870‐1885. The collection is indexed by author, title, and subject; it is also searchable by keyword.
The image reproductions are quite good, and most would be suitable for immediate use by musicians. The usefulness of the sheet music, however, is limited only by the image format. The image files are usually only available in TIFF, with a separate file for each page image, which makes for a tediously long printing process. Many of the files are larger than standard letter size, and many browsers will have trouble printing TIFF images directly, so users intending to print will be well served by image manipulation software that will allow them to crop and resize images before printing (some files are in GIF or JPG format, and so more readily readable by Web browsers, but the single large page will remain a barrier to printing). The TIFF format is excellent for the archival purposes of the American Memory Project, but the collection could be made more accessible by the addition of a more printer‐friendly, multi‐page format such as PDF.
The collection’s interface and indexing are adequate, but not up to the standards one would expect from the Library of Congress. In particular, the subject headings are inconsistently applied and awkwardly implemented. Where people are used as subjects, some are listed by their first name (Zachary Taylor in the Zs, Daniel Webster under D, etc.), whereas others will appear by last name with no first name listed at all (e.g. Barnum, Dickens, and Shakespeare).
Using the browse feature, clicking on an author entry appears to perform a keyword search on the author field rather than looking for an exact author match. Therefore, clicking on the name of the author “Clifton, A.” will retrieve results including those with the author “Merritt, Clifton A.E.”. Because the results appear only as titles with no other information on the main result screen, it is not immediately apparent that the search was so indiscriminate – especially in a context for which a high level of authority control is the norm in bibliographic databases.
A similar authority problem exists for subject searches. The subject heading “Temperance” finds all of the records containing the subject “Temperance” as well as records listed as “Temperance – Songs and Music”. It is unclear why both subjects even exist, since all of the records are for “Songs and Music”. The utility of the subject browse/search feature is impaired by the fact that many records lack subject headings, even where relevant headings are in use elsewhere in the collection. For example, there are 482 entries with the subject “Quadrilles”, but there are dozens of quadrilles that have no subject entries and therefore do not come up in that search. They do appear with a general keyword search if the word “Quadrille” appears in the title.
Where subject headings are included, they are very useful. Users looking for songs about social issues and historical events will find subjects for Abolition, the Chicago Fire, Fourth of July, Mesmerism, Waifs, Orphans, Beggar Children, Smoking Songs, and Temperance (as well as its opposite number: Drinking Songs). Those seeking instrument‐specific music will find subject entries for Piano Music, Zither Music, Xylophone Music, etc. Similarly, dance tunes and other musical forms are listed by name: Ballads, Czardas, Dirges, Lancers, Reels, Schottisches, Waltzes, etc.
Despite the various technical and architectural flaws, this is a vastly useful archive of primary source material. There are published collections of nineteenth‐century popular music (such as the American Musicological Society’s “Music of the United States of America” series) but they tend to be held by only very specialized libraries, and they lack the breadth of this collection. This free and universally accessible product will prove an excellent source for historians of popular sentiment as well as musicians interested in exploring the popular music of another age. Any public or academic library would do well to link to the collection.
