Janet Snowman, Royal Academy of Music's Collections Registrar with special responsibility for the Apollo Image Library, introduces The Apollo Image Library, which has become an invaluable resource for students and academics looking for source images for essays, articles and program notes.

During the past few years the Royal Academy of Music has been working to place its extensive collection of images, instruments and documents on-line, including items relating to many of those who both studied and taught at the Academy. To represent the collection, I chose the Academy's medal with its image of Apollo and his lyre, because of its link with Academy history. The medal had been awarded to students, with some gaps and until the cost of production had become prohibitive, from 1823 until the 1940s; it also seemed to work as an acronym for what we are doing!

apollo_medal	brahms_lowy_heliograph	paganini

The beauty of APOLLO is that we are able, to take as an example violinist Joseph Joachim, to let a student or visitor to the site examine letters, receipts, instruments, photographs of various ensembles which he played in, photographic portraits at different stages of his life, musical quotations in his hand, and perhaps programmes with which he, as a performer, was involved.

As well as the many paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, medals, ephemeral items, programmes, playbills, clothing, prizeboards and wonderful instruments from the Academy's historic collections, in the past ten or so years this has been enormously enhanced by items bequeathed by the former student and concert agent Norman McCann (McCann Collection); the collection of the scholar, lutenist and Academy professor Robert Spencer, acquired with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund and others; and the more recently-acquired Foyle Menuhin Archive, comprising iconography, in particular relating to Paganini, collected by Yehudi Menuhin.

Each of these three collections has its separate library and special collections counterpart - books, manuscripts and working scores, and of course many recordings. These are available through the Academy's library catalogue and, apart from some digitised images of pages of early English printed books (Spencer) and manuscripts which include Purcell's Fairy Queen and Sullivan's score of Mikado, are not listed on APOLLO.

APOLLO at present comprises some 15,000 records, with 8000 images attached - this may include multiple images for violins and instruments, for instance. The material is particularly rich in photographs and prints of performers, conductors and composers, as well as opera. However, owing to copyright, we are not able to show everything which is digitised, on-line. If you are, however, interested in historic 19th-century theatre and music playbills, over 500 digitised items (including some concert programmes) are included, all searchable for piece of music, performer, composer, venue, date etc. There is a very long subject index available on the page which is titled 'Types of material'. Also attached on this page is a basic listing of the holdings of concert programmes from the McCann Collection.

Try the following searches as examples of available material:

• Paganini - note that there are transcriptions of about 30 press reviews from his visit, drawings, prints, letters, paintings etc.
• Stradivari - should give you a good idea about an instrument record. This catalogue will be completed over the next couple of months - each instrument is concurrently been recalled for new measurements and photography.
• Violinist - will pull up lots of material too, as will 'opera' or 'pianist' . Where an image may not be present, this is for copyright reasons; we will, however, have a scanned copy internally.
• Bates - will give you a letter by Joah Bates to Charles Burney with regard to the Handel Commemoration of 1784, and George III. Or try a search on 'Letter'.
• Building will bring up lots of venues and building-related images
• Postcard - images of all descriptions from early technology to ensembles and venues

Do remember to go to the bottom part of an individual record in case there are alternative images. Click on these - click again for a second enlargement.

When searching for a particular name, it is easier to use just a simple surname.

joachim_elderly	london_reed_trio_1956	beethoven_bust

Also on the site is a series of simple tours using images contained within APOLLO, the most recent called Musical Notes, relating to early 20th century postcards with musical subjects, some quite fun. Other subjects include 19th-century opera iconography, sheets on Sir Henry Wood, Paganini, Moscheles, Academy history etc.

 • Purchasing images for commercial use
While we have not watermarked the images and we have made them available for personal use (the print quality is fairly good), if you do want to use any item for a CD cover, article or other commercial use you should get in touch with our digitisation team, who will help you with the acquisition of a top-quality version and with contractual information regarding use.

The Academy is grateful to the many organisations who have supported this project. It is excellent to see the material being used internationally - we have had nearly two and a quarter million hits since 31st October 2006, when we began to monitor numbers (we went on-line a few months prior to this). At the time of writing, the five most popular images include a plaster copy of Chopin's death mask, a postcard of the Pipe Major of the Dagenham Girl Pipers, an archival photograph of the Academy's female students c.1914 in an exercise class, the bust of Sir Henry Wood and a lithograph of the tenor Arturo Tamburini as Riccardo in Il Puritani.

As we are able to find small pockets of funding, further projects will be achieved. For instance, from the vast concert programme collection put together by Norman McCann, we are about to put onto APOLLO the contents of chamber music programmes from 1824-c1918 - again, so useful for teaching and research purposes. The large collection of historic Academy prizeboards will also be placed on-line, and these are always of interest to family researchers, as well as for historians and musical colleagues. Over the summer concentration was given to photographing the large collection of medals (historic, and also from the Foyle Menuhin Archive) and silver napkin rings used by Academy professors from c.1930-50s, and attaching these to their records. Hundreds of images of the many letters, documents, receipts and musical quotations from the McCann Collection were also attached. Further 19th-century music title sheets a recently-donated collection of prints and mezzotints should be on the system by the new year.

There still remains a unique photographic archive of thousands of photographs relating to both music and ballet to catalogue, and hundreds of historic early 20th-century postcards relating to the Opera Comique in Paris and La Monnaie in Brussels. The earliest images are those collected by Robert Spencer (earliest actually 1537 - record number 2003.2458).

Note that the Academy's institutional archives are looked after by the Library and do not form part of this catalogue, although some historic photographs and playbills are certainly included. Get browsing and have a peep. Let me know if any spelling or other errors occur, and enjoy what the Academy is now able to offer. On the front search page (soon to be replaced with a better design) are some ready-built sample searches - press a button and go!

Click here to navigate to The Apollo Image Library and scroll down until you see the image of APOLLO. Go to SEARCH, or select from the ready made quick searches at the bottom of the page.

Janet Snowman, September 2007

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