Archive and Music Documentation Centres BranchAuthor(s): John ShepardSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 54, No. 2 (April-June 2007), pp. 175-176Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23510592 .

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REPORTS

PROFESSIONAL

BRANCHES

Archive and Music Documentation Centres Branch

Swedish Archives at Home and Abroad (Monday, 19 June)

Three speakers investigated different col lections of Swedish music in Sweden and France. Erik Kjellberg briefly described the Düben collection at Uppsala University which comprises some 2500 works from

the 17th and 18th century by 230 composers

from many countries. Most works are in

manuscript and with the majority not known in any other sources; the collection

probably comes from the Swedish Royal Court library. A project to produce the first full catalogue of the collection was begun in

1988, and following more recent funding the database was completed and is planned

to be available online from September 2006 (www.musik.uu.se). The complex database includes eighty different cata

logue fields with facsimiles of all the pages and hyperlinks to a bibliographical data base of supporting literature and also to

sound recordings.

Two speakers described elements of the

archives of the Ballets suédois, a company

which existed from 1920 to 1925 as a rival to

Diaghilev's Ballets russes. When the com

pany closed, the archives were divided be tween the Dance Museum (Dansmuseet) in

Stockholm and the Bibliothèque-musée of the Paris Opéra. Erik Näslund from the Dansmuseet described the history of the

Ballets suédois and some of the exciting

treasures in the archive, including "lost" music for ballets by Cole Porter, Darius Milhaud and "Les Six", and demonstrated that despite their name the company's

repertoire was often neither ballet nor

Swedish, but French avant-garde theatrical dance. Mr. Näslund concluded with a

fascinating video segment of a recent

performance of Skating Rink—a Ballets

suédois creation, with music by Honegger—

choreography for which was reconstructed

by Millicent Hodson after archival research. Mathias Auclair from the

Bibliothèque-musée de l'Opéra de Paris (at the Bibliothèque nationale de France) then described the part of the Ballets suédois col

lection in Paris, which includes pho tographs, costumes, set designs and illus

trations, and a variety of ephemera. Hardly

any choreographic notations survive in ei

ther archive collection, but performances

can be reconstructed—as Hodson has

done—from reviews, photographs, designs

and costumes, and from consulting former

dancers of the time.

Creating Virtual Archives: a panel discussion (Thursday, 21 June)

Thomas Aigner of the newly-renamed

Viennese City Library (Wienbibliothek im

Rathaus, formerly Wiener Stadt- und

Landesbibliothek) described a project to

digitise all the Schubert music manuscripts in the library, which now comprises over

eight thousand digitized pages of music. The digital archive is now available at www.schubert-online.at in German and

English versions, and was demonstrated to

the audience. The database can be

searched by category of work, and sorted

by tide or Deutsch number, and it includes watermarks which can be related to the

same watermark in other works. The im

ages are scanned at 300 dpi for sale, or can

be viewed online at 150 dpi, and a digital watermark prevents unauthorized use. The

project team hopes to be able to extend the

database to include all Schubert manu

scripts in the future. Rex Lawson from the Pianola Institute in

London gave a brief overview of the current

situation regarding pianola rolls, most of

which have been destroyed. He described the history of the pianola, which started in

the 1870s as a table-top instrument and de

veloped to the pianola in 1895 and the

player-piano in 1909, for which Stravinsky wrote a considerable amount of music.

Music was originally transcribed from sheet music and punched out, and later was

"punched-as-played" on "reproducing" pi ano rolls. Evidence from early catalogues of

piano rolls indicates a huge market; the Aeolian Company had over fifty thousand

175

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176 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 54/2

titles, and the Library of Congress still has a large collection. To preserve the small

number of rolls remaining, which are on

frail paper, Lawson described how they could be scanned and stored, and it was

suggested that IAML sponsor an interna

tional listing of collections of pianola rolls to

support this preservation. Further informa

tion is available at www.pianola.org. Fontes

Artis Musicae, volume 53, issue 4, carries

his full paper. Paul Peeters from the Göthenburg

Organ Art Centre (GOART) at Göteborg University reported on the development of

a database for organs to include technical,

historical and archive information, includ

ing organs, people, places, companies and

other related information. The complex

database structure is in three parts; an or

gan database, an archive of written and

visual documents, and a person database.

Other databases arising from this include a

discography with around fourteen thou

sand organ pieces. Funding is currently be

ing sought to make this available on the

Web. Göran Kristiansson from the National

Archives in Sweden (Riksarkivet) de scribed the development of a national

archive database, started in 1990 and

funded by the government. The project benefited from an economic slump in the

1990s when the government paid for a thou

sand people to input data as a job-creation exercise. This allowed almost all the 650 km

of records in the national archives to be in

put, and the standardized record keeping of

the past century resulted in a consistent

system of record input. In 1997 a web-based

archive information system was built which includes preservation metadata, and there

are now over 20 million descriptions in the database. The project uses EAD and EAC standards in XML, and is now digitizing all the birth, marriage and death records at a

rate of 40,000 pages per day; the records

from the twentieth century are being scanned first and are expected to be com

plete by 2010. The next step is the digitisa tion of pre-1900 records from microfilm,

which is expected to take five years.

Comments from members of the audi

ence directed the discussion toward the

questions of how to secure institutional sup

port for contributing libraries' Schubert

holdings to the Viennese database, and what IAML can do to encourage libraries and archives to preserve their holding of

fragile and precious piano rolls.

John Shepard Chair

Broadcasting and Orchestra libraries Branch

Our first session was a working meeting

held at the Göteborgs Konserthus. We are

grateful to Jari Eskola, the librarian of the

Göteborgs Symfoniker, for arranging a tour

of the concert hall and his library, and en

abling us to hold our meeting at the

Konserthus. We used the working meeting

to share information about developments

during the year in our respective institu

tions. Members of the branch spoke about

new cataloguing projects, staff changes, the

effect of developments in computer tech

nology on the employment of music copy

ists, and charging mechanisms. A long dis cussion took place on the usefulness of the

OPAS management software. New pur

chasers were advised to make full use of

the technical help. The software had not

been found useful for ballet, and some

users had found a problem with non

English languages. Information was shared

on agreements with publishers, and advice

given by one broadcasting librarian to avoid

general agreements.

The second session included papers by Margareta Holdar Davidsson, the Library Manager of the Music Library, Swedish

Broadcasting Resources; by Bernhard

Pfau, a director of the publisher Schott Music; and Zoja Seyckova of the Bohuslav Martinü Institute, who kindly offered to speak about her organisation at very short

notice.

We were introduced to the work of the

Swedish broadcasting library with an ex tract of recorded music from a recent

Swedish and Danish commission, 'Ordet-en

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