IAML (UK & Ireland) Annual Study Weekend 2016

In the early days of copyright, Stationers' Hall in London listed copyright books and music, and legal deposit copies were sent initially to nine and later eleven libraries. The Scottish libraries got less, because they had more of a struggle getting it sent to them. I’ve been looking at the historic copyright music at the University of St Andrews: most of the material dates from the 1780s (when case-law established that music deserved copyright protection) to 1836, when legal deposit arrangements changed. Less than two-thirds of it has been catalogued online. The collection was described in an article predating the era of grant-funded retrospective online cataloguing, but it deserved a closer look. I’ve been examining archival and digital resources to discover what the University really thought of their music collection, and who used it. The evidence is scanty, but raises a bigger question: taken as a whole, what really happened to the Stationers’ Hall legal deposit music? Different libraries took differing views. This isn’t their story, but it may be the introductory chapter, and maybe big data might be the answer.