The Edwin Hughes Collection is a large collection containing a wide variety of materials, including correspondence, scores, photographs, concert programs, magazine and newspaper clippings, published materials, and scrapbooks. There are also materials relating to classes Hughes taught and organizations in which he was active. The collection gives us an interesting and detailed picture of the life of Edwin Hughes from the turn of the twentieth century until his death in 1965.

Edwin Hughes, an American pianist, teacher, and editor, was born in Washington, D.C. on August 15, 1884. He studied with such notable names as S.M. Fabian, Rafael Joseffy, and Theodor Leschetizky, and went on to serve as Leschtizky’s assistant from 1909-10. He taught at the Ganapol School of Musical Art in Detroit, MI (1910-12), in Munich from 1912-16, and at the Volpe Institute of Music (1916-17) and the Institute of Musical Art (1918-23) in New York City. He also taught several summer master classes in New York City and at the University of South Carolina.

Hughes made his European debut in Vienna in 1912 and his New York debut in the spring of 1917. He traveled and performed in both Europe and the United States, sometimes giving two-piano recitals with his wife, Jewel Bethany Hughes. In addition to his performing and teaching, Hughes also served as the editor-in-chief of piano music for G. Schirmer (1920-25).

From the early 1930s until the end of his life, Edwin Hughes was very active in music education. He offered piano masterclasses around the United States and participated in many music organizations such as the Music Teachers National Association, the Music Educators Association, and the National Council on Arts and Government.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Head of the Music Library, Jennifer Ottervik, for suggesting this as a possible digital collection. Thanks to Jason Beever for processing the collection. The project could also not have been completed without the work of Ashlie Conway, Music Librarian for Audio and Digital Services; Jeremy Snell, and Sarah Cameron, student employees of the music library; Saxony Scott (MLIS 2009) for metadata corrections and uploading the collection.

Creating the Digital Collection

This collection was scanned on a flatbed EPSON GT-15000 scanner, using EPSONscan 3.04A software. Jeremy and Sarah scanned the images as color TIFFs at a maximum ppi of 1200. From the TIFFs they each created high quality JPEGs and added the preservation metadata to the TIFF and JPEG images. The JPEGs were then uploaded to CONTENTdm. The TIFFs will be maintained as the archival masters on a SAN server, backed-up to DVD and tape.

Jeremy created a home page for the collection, and Jason created the metadata in an Excel spread sheet and wrote an introduction. The metadata records follow the Western States Best Practices Dublin Core format and were uploaded as a tab delimited file at the same time as the images. Saxony reviewed the collection and uploaded the images to the CONTENTdm database. Tony Branch is the systems administrator for the CONTENTdm database and helps to manage the computers and scanners in the Digital Activities Department.