Collection 30-012 - Silent Film Music Collection

Little is known about the original compilation of this collection. Originally held at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), professor and musicologist Paul Merkley consulted, in 2012, several boxes of uncatalogued, un-inventoried music of unknown provenance but known to have been used for the accompaniment of silent films in central Canada. Many sheets are stamped with A. E. Witham, A. E. Witham Quebec and A. E. Witham Violinist Toronto, a musician who lived and worked in Quebec and Toronto. LAC staff member, Gilles Leclerc, asked if the University of Ottawa Music Library at the time would be interested in taking the boxes off their hands. The music librarian, Debra Begg, and Paul Merkley agreed immediately.

In the Winter 2014, Paul Merkley gave a seminar course at the School of Music, built around the collection. This resulted in the initial cataloguing of the titles, two interviews with descendants of silent film musicians, and a screening of the 1927 silent film The Cat and the Canary with small orchestra made up of students. With the assistance of the Library and Audiovisual Support Specialist, Roxanne Lafleur, and use of RefWorks, a citation management tool, students were tasked with generating the metadata in a concocted schema using the MLA citation style supplemented with 14 new fields to capture such information as handwritten inscriptions, stamps, musical genre, etc.

In 2015, the collection was donated to Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa Library, where students Elsa Marshall, Tessa Bangs, and Chanel Jacinthe, hired with funding provided by Paul Merkley, began to review and digitize the collection under the supervision of Roxanne Lafleur. Between 2023-2025, Roxanne Lafleur (Digital Humanities and Support Specialist) supervised the scanning of further music sheets from the collection, with aid from high school co-op students working at the Archives and Special Collections, and completed the cataloguing process.