Banjo Collection

a banjo book cover

The Banjo,
and How to Play It,
by Frank B. Converse (1872)

Description

This is a collection of materials related to banjos held by the Rare Books and Special Collections Department. Many of these items were acquired from the Robert Fraker Collection of Nineteenth-Century Banjo Instruction Manuals.

Inventory

This collection includes 36 banjo instruction manuals, three published dissertations on the banjo, two banjo music sales catalogs, one loose piece of sheet music, and 32 minstrel broadsides. It provides images of every page of the materials and the full text of every item searchable.

Related Resource

Digital exhibition of 19th Century Banjo Instruction Manuals.
An exhibit that goes into more detail about five of these manuals. It also includes a selected history of the banjo, biographies of the manual compilers, and a partial bibliography of primary sources for further research.


 

For an introduction to the banjo, its history, and its cultural significance up to the Jazz Age and biographies of the authors of these banjo instruction manuals see 19th Century Banjo Instructons Manuals, a digital exhibit on the Hamilton College Library Online Exhibits website (powered by Omeka).

Credits

Research for this exhibit was conducted during the Summer of 2011 by Catherine Crone '13 (advised by Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley) as part of her project "A Study of Banjo Instruction Manuals from the Nineteenth Century." This work was funded by an Emerson Summer Collaborative Research Award.

Metadata for the collection was provided by the Technical Services Department of the Hamilton College Library.

Digitization

Digitization of this collection was done in-house on a flatbed scanner at 600 dpi, 24-bit color and saved as uncompressed TIF images. Images were converted from color to 1-bit TIFF images uploaded to CONTENTdm which generated JPEG2000 images for viewing and performed OCR on them to facilitate full-text searching.

For a selected bibliography of primary sources for further research on the history of the banjo, see Bibliography - 19th Century Banjo Instructons Manuals, a digital exhibit hosted on the Hamilton College Library Online Exhibits website (powered by Omeka).

Christian Goodwillie, Director of Special Collections and Archives
E-mail: cgoodwil@hamilton.edu
Telephone: (315) 859-4447

Special Collections
Burke Library
198 College Hill Road
Clinton, NY 13323