Collections include historical artifacts in multiple media formats that document America’s local and national music history and its diverse cultures.

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. Users can browse by illustrator.

This is a private collection of more than 10.000 illustrated sheet music mostly from between 1890 and 1940, with a particular interest for Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Although the collection centers around French illustrators (68%) it also contains hundreds of beautiful illustrations from Belgium (13%), the United States (6%), Great Britain (4%), Italy, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Argentina, etc.

IN Harmony features Indiana-related sheet music - sheet music by Indiana composers, arrangers, lyricists or publishers as well as sheet music about the state. It totals over 275,000 items. Most records include images of covers.

Numerous collections from the Library of Congress that includes everything from Dolly Parton to liturgical chants.

The Musical Instruments digital collection is a multicultural collection. The instruments represent the cultures of five continents and are from numerous countries of origin. There are currently 141 instruments in the collection.

The University of Washington Ethnomusicology Division houses over 400 musical instruments from around the world. Users can browse the entire collection, or browse by geographical or cultural areas, ensemble type, or video and sound files.

The Museum of Fine Arts has a strong musical instrument collection, and is home to over 1,100 instruments, including many European and American examples, as well as numerous pieces from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas.

The Nineteenth Century American Sheet Music Collection at the UNC-Chapel Hill Music Library includes approximately 3,500 popular vocal and instrumental titles from the 1830s to the end of the century. This site contains catalog descriptions and digital images of the individual pieces in the collection. Most records include the cover page.

The 19th Century Actors and Theater Photographs database consists of over 600 photographs including cartes-de-visite and cabinet card studio portraits of entertainers, actors, and actresses who performed on the American stage in the mid- to late 1800s.

The Bunraku gallery of Japanese puppet theatre is divided into plays, productions, authors, backstage subjects, kashira, and characters. It documents the form's revival in the second half of the 20th century, through more than 12,500 slides and nearly 7,000 black-and-white photographs of rehearsals and performances.

Theaters on Postcards is Andreas Praefcke's postcard collection of theatres and concert halls worldwide. The images are organized by location, and are fairly decent quality. Images are available for non-commercial purposes. The author invites users to email him for higher quality images if needed.

Features images and reference information on French theatre, circa 17th and 18th centuries.

The site includes approximately 400 Shakespeare related images from publicity photographs featuring regional production companies --Cleveland's Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada and others; New York stage productions; motion pictures; and televised productions including several highly praised series (The Shakespeare Plays, Hallmark Hall of Fame, etc.)

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Materials Collection from George Mason University contains nearly one thousand different 35mm slides taken from original posters, set designs, and costume designs. These images are of the original designs used on posters to advertise FTP plays in many different American cities from 1935 to 1939. Also included are playscripts for twenty-two productions. The images are indexed by title, author, subject, theater, place, date, and related names.

From the University of Wisconsin, "This online collection of selected electronic facsimiles seeks to share the marriage between book art and Shakespearean text with a wider audience. It also suggests the variety of responses by visual and book artists to the stimulus of Shakespeare's words. This online collection, originally published in venues as disparate as Philadelphia and Leipzig, includes images produced by an array of technologies available in the 19th and early 20th centuries" Users can browse or search the collection. It contains high quality images, and its contents are available for educational use.

The Sayre Collection consists of more than 24,000 photographs of theatrical and vaudeville performers, musicians, and entertainers who played in Seattle between about 1900 and 1955 (some of the materials date back to the 1870s).

This site provides a visual chronicle of the artistic productions of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the years 1977-1994. The collection presents 1,800 images documenting 195 performances during these 17 seasons.

The Motley Collection of Theatre and Costume Design at UIUC is a valuable source of documentation on the history of theatre. It is a rare collection of original materials on the theatre comprising over 5000 items from more than 150 productions in England and the United States. These materials include costume and set designs, sketches, notes, photographs, prop lists, storyboards, and swatches of fabric.

Collections are searchable, or browsable by time period or category.

This collection of The Ohio State University Libraries' Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute includes costume and scene designs from more than fifty productions by British designer Daphne Dare (1929-2000). Dare designed for major theaters on both sides of the Atlantic as well as for television and film.

Portraits of Actors, 1720-1920 from UIUC includes almost 3,500 pictures of actors — studio portraits and actors posing in costume for a particular role or performing a scene from a play. Dramatists, theatrical managers, singers and musicians are also included, but the majority are British and American actors who worked between about 1770 and 1893. Among the hundreds of actors included are: Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, John Philip Kemble, Edwin Booth, Edwin Forrest, William Henry West Betty, Charles Mathews, Dorothy Jordan, Frances Abington, and Ada Rehan.

The collection includes photographs and ephemera relating to the career of Pat Prior and Effie Norris and the history of vaudeville. This includes images of friends and colleagues of Prior and Norris, identified and unidentified vaudeville performers of the late 1800s and early 1900, publicity postcards, and vaudeville stage productions, the most significant being Fanchon and Marco.

This database of images traces the history of stagecraft through Shakespearean prints, 18th, 19th and 20th century European and American handbills, posters and heralds, souvenir photographs and prints of the legendary performers of the past three centuries, numerous production and publicity stills of 20th century plays and films, and hundreds of individual photographs of the legendary and the now forgotten stars of minstrel, vaudeville and burlesque.

This collection is composed of three parts: the Twin City Scenic Company collection, the Great Western Stage Equipment Company Collection, and the Holak collection. The overall collection is the only one of its scope in the United States, and uniquely documents the technical environment of the popular stage during the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth century. Renderings and materials related to Freemason ceremonial performances are heavily represented in the Holak and Great Western collections.

The Vandamm archive documents almost comprehensively three decades of theatrical history in New York. The thousands of items in this digital presentation are a sampling of an archive of more than 75,000 images of theatrical personalities and productions. Images in the current presentation represent glass plate and acetate negatives primarily.

417 fashion plates from the Blanche Payne collection, including fashion from the Empire, Georgian, Regency, Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian eras.

Wayne State University maintains four costume collections, with a total of over 5,000 images. To browse the collections, click on one of the four listed collections. To search across collections, click on "costume collections."