Matanya Ophee microfilm

Matanya Ophee gathered microfilm reels from many libraries worldwide to support his research and publishing work. The reels were not originally part of the collection which went to Appalachian State University. Through the efforts of Oleg Timofeyev and Robert Coldwell, all the reels were gathered and cataloged. The reels have been donated to Appalachian State University to become part of the Matanya Ophee Collection.

As can be seen in the catalog, there are many reels from libraries which have digitized their content, such as the Boije and Rischel & Birket-Smith collections. The dates on the reels start as early as the 1970s when microfilm was the only way to acquire reproductions of music. There are reels containing items which might never be digitized by the holding libraries. There are also some duplicates with versions in both positive and negative.

Overall the quality of the films are good. In the process of cataloging I removed all rubber bands and non-archival tape, and replaced with archival microfilm wrappers and tape. Some films from different libraries were taped together. In a few cases I did minor trimming and re-taping when the original splice was done poorly or the splice reversed one of the sections.