Leslie Jean Richards and Dr. Claudine Bigelow, School of Music
Brigham Young University houses the Primrose International Viola Archive, the largest repository of viola music in the world. In addition to sheet music for the viola, this collection also includes recordings, photographs, books, violas, and many manuscripts penned or edited by Primrose himself. These manuscripts are an invaluable part of this collection, but have had limited availability to the public. As my project for the Office of Research and Creative Arts I focused on making this collection accessible to the public by cataloguing the manuscripts and making the records available on the online library catalogue.
Having worked as a library employee, I already had some experience in cataloguing music scores. In cataloguing a score, the cataloguer records information about the score which will be helpful in assisting patrons to find it, such as the composer, publisher, instrumentation, number of pages, editors, etc. In Primrose’s personal scores there are other special features to be noted, such as Primrose’s own bowings and fingerings as well as special signatures or dedications.
As I began my work, however, many problems became evident. The Music Library houses many collections and archives, many of which are being processed and/or inventoried. As these collections are integrated into our library holdings it is necessary to maintain consistency in the methods of cataloguing. Many of the scores which I worked with were hand-written by William Primrose and special cataloguing procedures are used in such cases. Since our standard method of such procedures is as yet undefined, I was unable to catalogue the hand-written scores.
Although unable to work with the hand-written scores, I was able to catalogue all the commercially published scores in the collection, using records obtained from RLIN and OCLC. A number of the scores in the collection are such commercially published scores and records for these pieces are now available on the online library catalogue. In addition I updated the list of collection holdings, which had not been revised since the 1980’s. Students, teachers, and viola enthusiasts are now able to search our catalogue for music scores personally edited or notated by William Primrose and take advantage of our unique collection. In the future, as work continues on the Primrose Archive, more and more of the collection will become available to the benefit of people worldwide.