Collections of musical documents. Rare books, special books?

Music as sound performance, as creative idea and as a social phenomenon enter documentary archives under diverse categorical modalities. Music created in a performance or concert can be found in the record of sound and audiovisual representations or as graphic records such as a printed or hand-written musical score, whether old, modern or digital, aswell as in diverse textual and graphic documents of music or texts referring to music. Music is expressed in an array of document types, including, books of manuscripts or printed materials; musical scores, and audio and audiovisual recordings. Regardless of format or support, a document provides a record of a particular environment, which may be academic, religious, commercial or artistic, while reflecting the development of the music, the technical skill of the composer, as well as development of technology. The record may be part of a collection that stands out in the memory of a people. This wide variety of documents and vast number of tangible musical objects constitute the representation or material vehicle of the intangible expression that is music, and as such shall require an interdisciplinary approach for both study and management.