Library Score

School of Music of the University of Rochester is bringing music to the world: offering high quality reprint editions of scores from its premier research and performance collections held in the Sibley Music Library. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sibley Music Library has recently digitized 20,000 public domain music scores from its circulating collections. While free digital availability of these scores is a wonderful service of the library, single-sheet home printouts often do not work well on music stands for performers. This site offers for sale a selection of Sibley's digitized scores, digitally edited to remove marks and blemishes, printed on sturdy paper, and bound as sheet music pamphlets. Sibley Music Library’s Conservation Department has long experience in providing such pamphlets as preservation copies to replace brittle scores, whose acidic paper is literally crumbling to bits. The Library’s experience in making preservation copies is now put to good use in providing musicians and other libraries print-on-demand copies from our digital collection. Library Commerce, created through a generous grant from the Friends & Foundation of the Rochester Public Library, Harold Hacker Fund for the Advancement of Libraries, is a new venture whose mission is to offer a safe and convenient sales platform to libraries wishing to use commercial sales to support library programs. Providing free public access to materials and information is a central function of many libraries, but some library activities add significant value to holdings in their care. Library Commerce helps libraries to sustain their programs by allowing patrons to purchase “value added” content or services like the edited, printed and bound musical scores offered by Eastman Scores Publishing, its first partner. This new Print-on-Demand collection is currently limited to sheet music that can be bound as pamphlets. We are investigating ways that longer scores can also be made available in cost-effective reprints, and will be adding new publications as they are edited and ready for sale. We hope you enjoy the scores, and invite your feedback and suggestions for new publications from Sibley Music Library’s digitized material.