Sheet Music: Free Download Sites, Historical Information, etc.

•   19th-Century American Sheet Music Digitization Project (University of North Carolina)
•   African-American Sheet Music from Brown University  (Part of the American Memory Project.) This collection consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920.
•    American Memory Collections:  Performing Arts (Library of Congress)
•   Bagaduce Music Lending Library (Blue Hill, Maine).  Their mission is to collect, preserve and lend printed sheet music and scores, and to provide music education programs.
•   Gaylord Music Library list of Sheet Music Collections (Washington University, St. Louis).  Scroll to the foot of the page for a description of the Gaylord Music Library Sheet Music Collection.
•    Historic American Sheet Music (Duke University).  The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.
•    Indiana University - Sheet Music.  Indexes some of the more than 150,000 pieces of sheet music in several collections; includes those which have been digitized.
•    Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection (John Hopkins University).  The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music is part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University. It is comprised of popular American music spanning the period 1780 to 1960. The over 26,000 pieces of music in the Levy Collection are indexed on this site, and images of the cover and music are available for pieces of music more than 75 years old.
•    Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 (Library of Congress Music Division).  Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 consists of tens of thousands of pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the post-Civil War era. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred music and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra. This first release of the online collection consists of over 22,000 musical compositions registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1879. The second online collection release (scheduled for the Fall of 1999) will make available an additional 23,000 titles registered during the years 1880 to 1885.
•   The Petrucci Music Library is an internet-based collaborative music score library. You will find tens of thousands of scores composed by thousands of composers here, all available for free download.
•   Sheet Music Collections (MLA Sheet Music Roundtable).  Annotated lists of collections with links to indexes or digital music sites.
•   Sheet Music Consortium (UCLC). An Open Archives Initiative collection of digitized sheet music from a group of libraries, including the Library of Congress, the National Library of Australia, Duke University, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, and the University of Maine.
•   Sheet Music from Canada's Past (Library and Archives Canada).