Not Just Sheet Music: Describing Print and Manuscript Music in Archives and Special Collections

The professional literature on archives and music librarianship in theUnited States only tangentially addresses the management of music archival records.Archives and special collections libraries often find print and manuscript music amongsttheir holdings, even if they are not music-specific repositories. Because printed musicmaterial is a proxy for the work and not the work itself, adequate description of thesematerials may require more granularity than archivists customarily provide. Existingstandards for archival description require more work before they will describe musicas easily as they describe text. The article offers descriptive examples for typicalmanifestations of musical works.Peer reviewe