Project History: The Klimek Experience

Note: A more general project history can be found here.

Background

The North Royalton (Ohio) Community Band (NRCB) received a donation of several boxes of band music from the Klimek family of Parma, Ohio. The music had been accumulated by the Ambridge (Pennsylvania) Community Band. Mrs. Klimek's late husband had been the director of the band and Mrs. Klimek had been the music librarian for the band.

The music in the collection dated back to the 1920's, 30's and early 40's. In all, the collection included over 400 band arrangements of marches, popular songs, patriotic songs, light classical music, and ethnic dances.

A 4-member committee of the NRCB took on the task of sorting through the mass of materials to catalog and arrange the library for use by the band. This work started in early January and continued to the middle of May, 2005. The committee met weekly at the North Royalton branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

This paper will describe the methodology used in this endeavor and point out some of the things we did right, some things that we did wrong, and other lessons learned in the process.

A total of 13,816 pages were scanned. In all, we estimate that the project took about 500 man-hours to complete over a period of 5 months.

Archiving the Collection

Size of the Collection

The collection came to us in about multiple cardboard cartons. Each carton was the size of a case of copy paper. 3 cartons were filled with march size music and 4 held octavo size and larger size music. There were approximately 280 march size pieces and about 100 octavo and large size pieces. In addition, there were several band booklets of music and some miscellaneous music. In all, there were approximately 25,000 individual sheets of music.

Condition of the Music

In general, the condition of the music was very good considering its age. The paper was, of course, yellowed with age. Printed by various publishers, there was a wide variation in the texture of the paper, the clearness of the printed image and the size of the music.

Most march size music came from the publisher printed on octavo size stock with two parts printed on a page, one above the other. The parts in this library were usually cut with scissors or torn to separate the two parts. Often the cut or tear was at, or through, the title of the bottom part. The resulting stack of parts was not all of equal size. Some publishers printed march size music on double octavo stock so that 4 parts were cut from the same sheet. Thus, even the widths of these parts were not uniform or parallel.

Most of the march size music was simply stored in packs of the cut sheets. However, some sheets had been bound in march folios for individual performers and some pieces had been pasted back to back for performances, possibly for marching in parades and such. Some of the back to back pieces were bound with cloth tape on one edge to be placed in individual folios and some even had been bound with brass edges. Separating these bound, pasted and taped parts was often necessary. Don't throw any of these out. Some will contain parts not found elsewhere. If worse comes to worse, you can always make a photocopy of both sides to preserve a copy of the music.

Some of the march size music had large "performance" numbers written one inch high in red or black crayon. In the main, this did not interfere with the legibility of the printed music. Also, the music was remarkably free of tears or other damage requiring repair. And few sheets (less than a dozen) had previously been repaired with scotch tape or in any other manner. The only real problems with regard to the condition of the music were the aforementioned yellowing and the parts that had been bound and/or pasted together. Untold hours could have been required if the music had been marked up by the performers or was in need of repair.

Methodology

Sorting and Cataloging

Sorting the music became the first order of business. We started with the three boxes that held music printed in march size (approximately 5" x 7"). We alphabetized the music by first placing the music by first letter on designated tables and then sorting through the resulting stacks. Luckily, most of the music had been collected in stacks with the different instrument parts for the same piece together. I said most, but please understand that "strays" were quite prevalent, especially with the more popular pieces, such as Sousa marches and other community band standards. Also the bound and pasted pieces of music caused some problems in this regard.

We made a couple of mistakes at this stage. We decided to discard any music that would be inappropriate for the band and we threw out some sheets that were in very poor condition or sometimes ones that were used to wrap and separate the packs of music. One should not throw anything out at this stage - later on, these kinds of decisions can be made.

One minor annoyance is the method of alphabetizing the music. Foreign titled music, such as "El Capitan March" and "Marche Militaire" and the pieces whose title begins with "March of", "Song of", "Waltz of", etc. keep shifting around in the boxes as well as such titles as: "St. Julian March" and "2nd Regiment …".

Bringing the boxes to the public library meeting room each week became a problem and headache. Fortunately, we were able to make arrangements with the library to store our materials in one of their storage rooms between Thursdays. This is one of the most significant arrangements that we made and would be considered essential for any similar project.

We soon discovered that handling the packs of march size music during the initial sorting stage was inefficient and counterproductive. Someone suggested placing the music in plastic bags. One quart, zip-loc, sandwich bags turned out to be adequate for this purpose. They were big enough to store one arrangement of this size music and, being transparent, didn't require extensive labeling or much other additional effort. We soon discovered that you should not "seal" the individual bags. If you did, the trapped air made storing them densely in boxes very difficult as the bags would tend to "pop" out of position. Plastic bags are only a temporary sorting solution and not for long term storage.

Next, we felt we had to catalog the pieces, note which are considered significant, and sort the individual pieces in concert band order. We further decided that we would electronically scan each piece of music so that we would not need to rely on the original printed copies, some of which were approaching 100 years old.

Sorting to concert band order is a very time consuming process. With this size music, it takes from 5 to 15 minutes per piece to sort. It is also a very solitary task - there is no need for the entire committee to be present to sort the music. We decided that the individual members would be welcome to take some of the packages home to sort or to come to the library when they could find the time and sort music there between regular Thursday morning sessions. This cut down the overall length of the project by several months.

We made mistakes at this stage too. We were anxious to take some of the pieces for immediate use by the NRCB and we originally were only going to catalog the more important pieces. One should avoid taking anything from the collection until it has been completely processed and you might as well catalog all of the pieces at one time. Also, sorting in concert band order should wait until all the music is sorted by title, otherwise, you will find individual sheets that must be slipped into the individual packets - some of which are parts that had previously been missing. Once the pieces are sorted by instruments, the best copy of each part should be separated for scanning. We wrapped these with a small, brown, folded paper to identify that the piece was ready to be scanned. We also prepared white wrappers for all the pieces, identifying which parts were present. In hindsight, these white wrappers should have been printed in landscape mode with three checklists per 8-1/2" x 11" page. The resulting size would have been more appropriate for the march size music. They also should have been filled out after the sorting had been done because they were not always updated when strays were added. Unfortunately, all the work that went into producing these wrappers may not be very useful because the wrappers remain with the original music. For this reason, they should have been scanned with the music.

We started scanning individual pieces before sorting was completed. This produced several problems. When additional pages were found, it was difficult to ensure that a complete scan of the piece was maintained. This meant that later on we had to do "quality control" of the scanned images to ensure that they were as complete as possible.

We slipped a purple piece of paper in the sandwich bag to indicate that that particular piece had been scanned.

We brought in the boxes of octavo size music (approximately 7" x 10") and large size music. We sorted this and scanned it. In general, it did not cause any significant problems. Although we had 5 boxes of this music, there were only about 150 individual pieces. And most were in separate packages. Very few "strays" were present. Scanning presented no significant difficulties. The octavo pieces scanned with no problems and all but two of the large sizes fit in an 8-1/2" x 11" scan.

Oversize Pieces

There were two pieces of music in the collection which were not able to be scanned by our available flat bed scanners. The image of the music exceeded the area that the scanners accepted. Several options were discussed: Obtain the use of a scanner with a larger area; scan each page in two parts and "knit" them together; photocopy each page to a reduced size; hire an outside firm to do the scanning for us; photograph the pages and convert to PDF. We selected the option to photograph the pages. This took many hours to accomplish, but the other options presented difficulties which we were unwilling to face. No committee member had ready access to a larger scanner. A commercial scanner was available through business contacts of one of the committee members, except that no arrangements could be made during the part of the year we were interested (tax time) and when arrangements could be made, they would have to be on a Saturday or Sunday with strict security methods employed, including that the scanning would have to be done by an employee. We had no expertise in Acrobat so that "knitting" images appeared to be an extremely tedious process. We thought that the cost of having an outside firm do the scanning for us would be prohibitively expensive.

Scanning

Early on we decided that we would scan all the music in the collection and save it in an electronic format. This would make the collection extremely usable by the band for many purposes. Storage of the paper pieces would be unnecessary and the fragile paper would not be a factor. We decided that one copy of each of the printed parts should be scanned. Even parts that are no longer present in modern bands would be scanned. This ensures that nothing from the original arrangement would be lost. A modern arrangement of the piece could be made that preserved as much of the original intent of the composer as possible.

Since we were dealing with thousands of individual sheets of music, some methodology had to be developed to ensure a reasonably rapid method of scanning balanced with an appropriate level of quality. We also had to take into account the condition of the pieces.

The march size music had to be scanned so that reproduced copies could be read easily and could be blown up to a larger size if desired for readability. Octavo and large size music was often printed on both sides of the page and often consisted of 2, 3, 4 or more pages per part.

We decided to scan all the pieces at 300 dpi in black and white. For march size music, this produced adequate resolution at both a same-size image as well as a blown-up 8-1/2" x 11" image. Octavo size and large size actually had much better resolution than necessary.

We decided to keep the images in Adobe PDF format. This seems to be the standard that most organizations seem to use so that obsolescence should not be an issue. File sizes are pretty reasonable. March sizes run up to about 2 MB per file (about 40 KB per page) while octavo and large size pieces run upwards to about 18 MB per file (about 80 KB per page). A file contains one complete musical score.

Scanners

When we started scanning the music, speed was of paramount concern. One of the committee members had access to a multi-function Copier/Scanner/Fax machine that had multi-sheet feeding capability. It is capable of scanning march size music at about 2 seconds per page. It has a straight feed paper path so that damage to the original is minimal. It is capable of feeding and scanning all but a very few of the pieces with minimal possibility of damage. The problems with this scanner are that it doesn't scan the top 1/8" or bottom 1/8" of the page, and it has only one feed roller, so that sometimes the feed mechanism would pick up two or more pages at a time. The single feed roller also means that often the march size music will go through at an angle, cutting off two corners of the music in the scanned image. With practice, we were able to control the music feeding through the scanner so that the tilting problem was minimized. However, the cutting off of the top and bottom edges could not be prevented. One technique that could have been used to minimize this problem would be to feed the pages in sideways. Picking up multiple pages was minimized by "fanning" the pages before inserting them in the scanner and controlling the feeding of the pages. The different sized, cut pages and the varying condition of the individual pages exacerbated the problem. Carefully monitoring the scan process and rescanning problem pages seems to be the best solution.

The combination scanner worked surprisingly well on the octavo size music. Single page music could be fed easily because the paper guides generally held the paper so that tilting was limited and the music was printed with sufficient space at the top and bottom so nothing was cut off. Even double octavo pages could be scanned with minimal distortion. Carefully feeding the folded pages usually resulted in minimal, if any, slippage or slanting.

The larger size music could not be fed into the combination scanner because the feed path only allowed paper up to 8-3/4" wide.

Two members had flat bed scanners that could scan up to 8-1/2" x 12". These were adequate for everything except for two large size pieces which were printed on very large paper so that the printed portion of the pages exceeded the scanners' capabilities. The major problems with the flat bed scanners were their speed and the necessity of manually placing each page on the scanning surface. Software for the scanners allowed combining the images from the eighty or so pages making up an arrangement to be combined into one file. The flat bed scanners were also used to rescan some of the march size music that did not scan well on the multi-function scanner.

Converting the scanned images from the scanner's native file to Adobe PDF required either a fully functional copy of Adobe Acrobat or some other proprietary software.

Finishing Touches

Cropping, straightening and cleaning the pages brought most of the digital images to nearly pristine condition. Software features in "Paper Port" and "Adobe Acrobat" made these finishing touches straightforward, if time consuming.

Quality Control

For various reasons, we decided that the electronic files we created needed to be checked for quality and rescanned when necessary. Some of the reasons include: cutting off some music scanned by the multi-function scanner, skipped pages, and poor contrast of some of the music. When problems were found, sometimes only the pages affected were rescanned on a flat bed scanner, or sometimes the entire piece was rescanned on the flatbed scanner.

Summary

The Klimek collection contained over 400 "pieces" of music containing several thousand pages. The committee sorted all the music and scanned 13,816 of the pages. We produced a two-volume set of CD-ROMs with about 900 MB of the scanned images.