Partner Event | Digital Possibilities Series: Digital Realities and Possibilities for a Sousa Archives Researcher

The University of Illinois’ Sousa Archives and Center for American Music is both a special collections music archive and museum whose historical collections document diverse musical cultures, legacies, and technologies in North, Central, and South America - as well as portions of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Our collections are meant to be actively engaged by people of all ages, musical backgrounds, and abilities. Our philosophy is grounded in providing access to our music collections, using all available resources and technologies to enable our visitors to engage with our collections physically, intellectually, and actively.

This philosophy for archives and museums might seem obvious to librarians.  However, many archives and museums’ music collections frequently remain silent, dead, and forgotten. The music and instruments’ voices no longer speak for themselves because they are either carefully exhibited behind glass or preserved in specialized storage cabinets as music paperweights, until discovered and explored by specialized music scholars.

Today’s technologies hold much promise for archives' and museums’ music collections, because these digital resources and tools now make it possible for scholarly researchers and the public to actively engage with these unique historical collections both on-site and online from anywhere in the world. In this presentation, Scott Schwartz will highlight how the Sousa Archives approaches on-site and online public engagement to its music collections using some of today’s digital technologies.

This is the fourth webinar in the summer Digital Possibilities series, a joint collaboration between the Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) and Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC).

Presenter:

Scott W. Schwartz is the Director and Archivist for Music and Fine Arts for the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to his arrival in Illinois in September 2003, he worked as an archivist for the Duke Ellington and American music collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.  In 2022, he was recognized by the American Bandmasters Association with the Edwin Franko Goldman Citation award for his contributions to the preservation of America’s wind band traditions. Previous recipients of the Goldman citation include composer Meredith Willson of The Music Man (1964), leading Sousa scholar Paul Bierley (1974) and John Philip Sousa III (1989), President William Jefferson Clinton (1994), University of Illinois alumnus John Haynie (2007), and composer John Williams (2020).
 

More information:

Partner Event | Digital Possibilities Series: Digital Realities and Possibilities for a Sousa Archives Researcher is made available to you via Minitex's membership in the Professional Development Alliance of Consortia.

This webinar will be hosted by the Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). You will receive further details regarding your attendance from CARLI. If you require assistance or further information, please contact support@carli.illinois.edu.