Opera & Ballet Primary Sources

Abstract

Opera & Ballet Primary Sources (OBPS) is one of the most recent and ambitious endeavours to make sources related to opera, ballet and other genres of music theatre easily accessible to scholars. The project focuses in particular on performance materials: libretti, ballet scenarios, scores in various formats, mise-en-scène documents, and programme announcements. It started in 2012 and is spearheaded by David A. Day, the curator of the special music collections at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, which also hosts the website (https://sites.lib.byu.edu/obps/). Day's work has concentrated on two kinds of activities. 1 First, he joined forces with the Internet Archive to digitize existing collections of music theatre sources at various institutions. 2 They started with digitizing BYU's own special collections, and then expanded to libraries and archives in Belgium. 3 Second, he is also in charge of creating two databases: the Index to Opera and Ballet Primary Sources Online (https://atom.lib.byu.edu/ obps/), and the Name Authority Files (https://atom.lib.byu.edu/obpsna/). The former is a searchable online database that brings together the sources from the BYU-Belgian collaboration with an ever-growing number of digitized collections with related contents from other institutions. The latter is a complimentary biographical database with information about the persons involved in creating the works included in the Index. These databases are the most visible and impressive part of this project. The Name Authority File contains 58,927 entries bringing together biographical data from about 90 scholarly works including various dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopaedias, and online catalogues and databases. The Index is continuously expanding and at the moment brings together documents from over 40 institutions in Europe, the United States and Canada (see Appendix). 4 It includes smaller 1 The initial stages of this project are described in David A. Day, 'Digital Opera and Ballet: A Case Study of International Collaboration', Fontes Artis Musicae 61/2 (2014): 99-106. 2 The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of cultural artefacts including books, audio, video, images, software and websites that are made freely available to the public. It was founded in 1996 in San Francisco and works together with numerous libraries and institutions around the world to digitize existing collections of historical materials. See