The latest release of Harvard’s Page Delivery Service (PDS) – the system through which we share our digital scores with the world – is live, and there are a few enhancements to share with you.
We spend a lot of time writing a structural outline for every score we digitize, to make it easier to find works, movements, scenes, and even single arias. While we’ll keep adding that full indexing, it’s now possible to navigate using thumbnail images of each page, as well: when you’re looking at a digitized book or score, click “Expand All,” then “Show Thumbnails” in the left-side navigation frame. This might be an interesting way to get a simple visual overview of a work’s structure, and I have to admit that for some scores, it’s just fun; take a look at the thumbnails for this copy of Debussy’s La Boîte à Joujoux: Ballet pour Enfants, and I think you’ll see what I mean.
The next addition is a “Cite this Resource” button: click this to get descriptions and persistent links for both the entire score and the single page you’re looking at. These aren’t perfectly-formatted citations, but they gather a lot of the information you’ll need in a bibliography or caption. Here’s a screenshot, using a page from La Boîte à Joujoux as an example:
Screenshot: PDS "Cite This Resource" Tool (click to enlarge)
And finally, the full print-to-PDF option is back! Requests for 10 or fewer pages are delivered in real time; if you request more than 10 pages, you’ll be sent a link to the PDF once it’s been processed (those links remain available for 7 days).
Ready to start exploring? Digital Scores and Libretti is, of course, my favorite, but check out other Digital Collections of Harvard College Library and Web-Accessible Collections at Harvard University for photographs, pamphlets, manuscripts, books, maps, and other rare materials ranging from Digital Papyri to Latin American Pamphlets.
– Kerry Masteller