Historic American Sheet Music . Molly Bragg, Digital Collections Program Manager, Duke University Libraries. URL: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/ From medieval manuscripts to parlor songs, musical scores are a popular item for digitization in the United States and Europe. In the United States even libraries with relatively small special collections often hold sheet music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many institutions have invested in digitizing this music and posting it online, as few of these documents are under copyright. The larger digital repositories for sheet music include African American Sheet Music hosted by Brown University and the Historic Sheet Music Collection on the Library of Congress's website, as well as the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection at Johns Hopkins/ Peabody and the Digital Collections Archive of Popular American Music at the University of California, Los Angeles.1 Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music Digital Collection (hereafter HASM) is an archive of 3,042 digitized pieces of sheet music (both popular and classical genres) published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.2 The university holds about 20,000 pieces of American sheet music in total, so librarians chose to digitize a representative sample rather than the entire collection. The music was digitized and the database constructed in 1997 and 1998, a lifetime ago in the fast-moving world of the digital humanities.3 While some aspects of the website are showing its age, the database is intuitive to use and contains a wide range of music that makes it a valuable resource for …