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DEFINITION
A drawing or illustration of an object.
NOTES & EXAMPLES
In Music Division collections, you will find many kinds of designs for dance, theater, and musical theater productions:
Scroll through the gallery below to explore each type of design!
DEFINITION
Printed documents created for a limited purpose and discarded after use.
NOTES & EXAMPLES
Types of ephemera in Music Division special collections include receipts, ticket stubs, brochures, flyers, invitations, order forms, programs, and menus. People collect ephemera to document events, productions, or performers. Ephemera can also be found within scrapbooks.
Examples of special collections with ephemera include the Marge Champion Collection, Muriel Manings and William Korff Papers, and collections in the gallery below!
DEFINITION
A reproduction that attempts to represent the original as closely as possible.
NOTES & EXAMPLES
The Music Division holds published books that are facsimiles of musical works. These publications often contain scholarly introductions. The Music Division holds facsimiles of items in our collections, as well as facsimiles of items held by other institutions. Facsimiles are excellent reference tools if originals are fragile, rare, or if the repository of ownership has not made images available online.
The Music Division has scanned the facsimile of Felix Mendelssohn's Octet op. 20 (image at left). Both the facsimile and the original are in the Music Division's holdings.
An example of a published facsimile for an item not owned by the Music Division is this facsimile of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte.
The Music Division also holds facsimiles that are copies of originals without scholarly commentary. These scores may be found in the online catalog and reading room card catalog under the call number class ML96.5.
DEFINITION
A document for the discovery and use of archival resources.
NOTES & EXAMPLES
Finding aids come in many formats, from printed paper guides to PDF documents to encoded online documents. At the Library of Congress, finding aids are available as online documents created using Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a form of Extensible Markup Language (XML). You can also download PDF document versions from the EAD interface.
Finding aids contain structural and contextual information about a group of archival materials. Structural information is the inventory of boxes and folders so that users can ask for portions of a collection that they need. Contextual information is found in the "front matter," the introductory text of a finding aid.
Front matter explains who created the collection, general contents of collection categories ("series"), languages of materials in the collection, and date ranges of materials. The front matter of finding aids also indicates how and when the Library obtained the collection ("provenance"), and also lists other materials at the Library with related subject matter.
Learn more below!
A finding aid provides a detailed description of a collection by summarizing the overall scope of the content, conveying details about the individuals and organizations involved, and listing box and folder headings. Special service conditions are noted, including terms under which the collection may be accessed or copied. Links are provided to digitized content, when available.
See the table below for a description of each section found in a finding aid.
| Section in Finding Aid | Definition |
|---|---|
| Collection Summary | An overview of the collection, giving research information such as the full title, the dates the collection content covers, the language(s) the collection is in, the location it's stored, and a summary of collection contents. |
| Selected Search Terms | The terms listed under this heading have been used to index the description of a collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation. They are listed alphabetically within each section. |
| Administrative Information | Information on how the Library obtained the collection, other divisions that have content from the collection, the location of additional resources or indexes relating to the collection, details about copyright and donor-imposed restrictions, and the preferred format to create a citation for the collection. |
| Biographical Note | Offers broader historical context of the collection and often provides a timeline of important events that relate to the collection's content. |
| Scope and Content Note | Provides a history of the relevant events relating to the collection, gives an overview of what the collection content is about, and highlights notable items or correspondents in the collection. |
| Arrangement/Organization of the Papers | Describes the arrangement of the collection as processed by archivists. |
| Description of Series | This section describes the contents of each box in the collection on a folder-level basis. |
Keyword search Library of Congress finding aids at findingaids.loc.gov.
When you open findingaids.loc.gov, all Library of Congress finding aids are searched by default. Researchers can narrow their search to finding aids for manuscript collections only. Find the drop-down menu, "Within Library of Congress Collections", select "Manuscript" to search only Manuscript Division collections.
