Braille Music Offer: an experiment in gifts

This post announces the beginning of an ongoing project to make available -for FREE – excess copies of braille scores.  This is not the first time that we have blogged about gifts. See this post by Mary Dell Jenkins.  But this is the first time the gifts are going out, not coming in. 

These are scores that have been received over the years as gifts from individuals, libraries and braille producers.  The overwhelming majority of these gifts are duplicates of titles already held in the music collection. We have enough copies to support patron borrowing without them.  These duplicates are the copies that we will be making available.

The scores are free for the asking and will be sent, to anyone, via Free Matter for the Blind, on a first-come-first-served basis.

We are primarily thinking of individual students and musicians or perhaps libraries. We will not send all titles on the list to any single requestor. But one may choose more than one title.  The list of scores can be found at this link.

The link takes you to an Excel spreadsheet. In future offerings, this spreadsheet will be updated with additions to the list, and subtractions when available copies have been claimed.

To claim your choices, please email the Music Section at [email protected] putting “Braille Music Offer” in the subject line. Identify your selection by author/title or control number. Please provide complete name and address.

This first offer is for a limited number of titles. And there is only one copy of each title in this offering. All the titles are  for piano.  Future updates to this list will add more titles and more instruments. We have many hundreds of titles to offer.

We welcome your responses and comments.