Digitizing our rare collections

In 2002 the Swedish National Collections of Music started digitizing some of the rare materials at its three institutions, with the support of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. The aim is to provide increased access to the material, as well as to protect the original sources.

The Library's part of the project includes the comprehensive collection of the composer Johan Helmich Roman's (1694-1758) manuscript sources. In December 2006 we launched a free Web-accessible accessible database of  the Roman Collection. In addition, a digitized version of Carl Oscar Boije af Gennäs's heavily used collection of 19th-century guitar music has been developed:

• Boije Collection 
• Roman Collection
• Music from Utile Dulci
  Utile Dulci ("[joining] usefulness with pleasure") was a learned society that flourished 1766-1795, a precursor of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. It was divided into sections, among them a  "musical Areopagus", whose music the Library owns. The collection is dispersed among the various composers and identifying the music requires painstaking work. A virtual catalogue should be completeted during 2008, and a database prototype (of the same kind as the Roman materials) is now accessible.
   

Other projects

• A joint project with the Swedish Society for Musicology (Svenska samfundet för musikforskning) is the ongoing complete digitization of the Swedish Journal of Musicology (Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning, STM), by far the most important musicological review in Sweden, to make it freely accessible online.
• Retrospective conversion of the Library's card catalogues
• Scores and/or parts produced at the Library from material in our collections. They will be catalogued in the online catalogue and the Libris database, but the scores will be available here for free downloading as well. The first work in this new service is B.H. Crusell, Introduction et air suédois varié pour clarinette et orchestre d´harmonie, op. 12. These editions have a purely pratical purpose, and fill no scholarly or critical ambitions.