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Collection Music Treasures Consortium

About this Collection

"Um mitternacht" by Franz Schubert. [manuscript score]. Music Division, Library of Congress.

About the Music Treasures Consortium

The Music Treasures Consortium provides online access to the world's most valued music manuscripts and print materials, held at the most renowned music archives, in order to further research and scholarship.

The Music Treasures Consortium is an alliance of many libraries with holdings of unique music resources, including music manuscripts, prints, and first and early editions. The Library of Congress is hosting the consortium Web site which gives bibliographic information on each item; access to the digital items is provided through links to the holding library's own Web site. Since each library provides bibliographic information for its items, the amount of information in each record may vary according to each institution's practice. Similarly, the interface and tools for each digital item will vary according to institution.

The items on this site are made freely available for scholarly use. Other uses may require permission or credit to the holding repository. Please contact the holding repository for more information.

Note: By default, digitized items are presented; To include items not digitized - View All

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Join the Music Treasures Consortium (MTC)

The founding institutions of MTC (Library of Congress, Juilliard School, Morgan Library and Museum, Harvard University, New York Public Library, and the British Library) serve as the governing committee in consultation with the Board of Advisors, and thus make decisions on inclusion of future partners.

To be eligible to participate, institutions must meet the following criteria:

  • Content criteria: Included in the consortium are primary source manuscripts, early printed editions of notated music, early treatises on music, and correspondence of prominent composers. Items should be similar in scope to those represented in RISM.
  • Technical criteria: Participating institutions must already have digitized images of their items that are supported on the institution's own web site. Digital images should be of high quality (recommended at 300 dpi or above) and in color whenever possible.
  • Metadata: there must be bibliographic metadata available for each item in MARC (ISO2709 or XML). The metadata should be supplied to the host institution (LC) as either attachments to an e-mail or, if too large, as an easily-accessible download (HTTP or FTP). Each bibliographic record must have a stable link or url to the digitized image of the item. The links should be in the MARC field 856 $u).

For more information, please contact Susan Vita at svit@loc.gov or Karen Lund at klun@loc.gov.