Evaluation of Web access to historical sheet music collections and music–related iconography

Previous research within Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has examined audio and textual facets in attempts to retrieve information about the music itself, including humming melodies, encoding of audio for transmission, extracting bibliographic data as well as melodies and harmonies. An area lacking within MIR relates to the retrieval of images and illustrations that often accompany printed music. Addressing that deficiency, this paper will briefly discuss historical American sheet music and report results from research indicating whether researchers can retrieve sheet music imagery from digital music collections, using basic Internet search engines. The findings are expected to advance our understanding of the complexities of retrieving digital music collections and music–related iconography