Bodleian’s entire maps and music collection now searchable online | IAML (UK & Irl)

"The Bodleian Libraries’ outstanding collection of 1.3 million maps and half a million printed music scores can now be discovered by searching SOLO, the Libraries’ online catalogue. The Libraries’ maps and music collections are among the largest and most important of their kind in the UK but, until now, records for the majority of their holdings were kept in old-fashioned card catalogues. Readers had to physically visit the Bodleian Library and search through cabinets of card catalogues in order to find what they were looking for.  Thanks to a three-year project funded by a £300,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, almost half a million catalogue records – some of which were handwritten on slips of paper in the nineteenth century – have been converted to fully digitized records. These records were then added to the Libraries’ online catalogue, SOLO, in summer 2015.  The Bodleian’s collection of music scores – anything containing music notation, manuscript or printed – range from the original conducting score of Handel’s Messiah and the 11th- century Winchester Troper to the sheet music of contemporary pop songs.  The Bodleian’s map collection ranges in date from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. It includes such treasures as the Gough Map, believed to be the first map of the UK, the Selden Map, a late Ming watercolour map of trade routes in the South China Sea, historic maps of Oxford and London from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a collection of 2,500 World War I trench maps.The project has unlocked access to these collections for scholars around the world. It’s a significant milestone given that more than 40% of Bodleian readers are not members of the University of Oxford, and many scholars travel to Oxford from around the world to consult the Libraries’ special collections. The effort to convert the card catalogues into digital records was no small task. Thousands of catalogue cards were scanned and rekeyed and then edited by a team of expert editors at the Bodleian ..."