Music Research Guide

The British Library is making these collections of ethnographic available for non-commercial research, study and private enjoyment.

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.

Around 800 videos, including 50 full concerts including classical music, jazz, pop-rock and world music.

The Loeb Music Library digitizes scores and libretti selected for their rare or unique natures and their popularity as objects of research and teaching. This digital collection includes manuscripts, first editions, and early editions of music from the 17th to the early 20th century. Many items, such as variant editions and annotated proofs of 19th-century operas and related libretti, are meant to be seen and used together. As a group, they give scholars a window into the study of historical performance practice.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. This search has already been set up to return musical scores only, but you can always adjust the keywords and filters to find what you need.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.

Sharing the world’s public domain music. The contents include searchable scores and recordings. You can browse for scores by composer, nationality, time period, and instrumentation or genre.

The New York Philharmonic Archives contains approximately six million pages that date back to its founding in 1842, with holdings that include correspondence, business records, orchestral scores and parts, photographs, concert programs, and newspaper clippings, as well as concert and broadcast recordings dating from the 1920s.

A collection of digitized music related materials curated by the Library of Congress. Once you access this resource, use the filtering options on the left-hand side of the new window to help narrow the search to what you are looking for.

The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) is an international, non-profit organization with the aim of comprehensively documenting extant musical sources anywhere in the world. RISM documents what exists and where it is kept. RISM's database offers the most comprehensive documentation available for music manuscripts and printed music for the time between 1600 and 1800.

The Sheet Music Consortium provides tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public.

Large collection of online scores in the Public Domain (pre-1924). Contains digitized printed music for selected opera scenes, songs, orchestral and choral literature, chamber music and piano music from the collection of the Cook Music Library, Indiana University.