By Geri Laudati
Over the years, Mills Music Library has been fortunate to participate in the Cooperative/Overseas Acquisitions Program, a service of the Library of Congress. As originally conceived, the program was a way to make use of foreign currencies that the U.S. government would accumulate from debtor nations, as outlined in P.L. 83-480. P[ublic] L[aw] 480 enabled research libraries in the United States to receive materials from countries such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Brazil at very little cost to the libraries.
As PL 480 funds were depleted, the program evolved into the Special Foreign Currency (SFC) Program, funded by the federal government, and the Library of Congress Cooperative Program, which is funded by the participating university and research libraries. Staff, both LC employees and free-lance scholars, in Field Offices in New Delhi, Jakarta, Rio, and Ghana identify materials available in the various countries currently covered by the program, and purchase them according to profiles established by individual American libraries.
Among the most significant historic music collections built through this source are the Modern Indonesian Collection and the Indian Film Music collection. Other major collections include recordings of Pakistani, Thai, and Malaysian music.
Most recently, Mills acquired the collection Acervo Funarte Musica Brasileira , an assortment of some sixty-five rare titles featuring the music of such composers/performers as Francisco Mignone, Pixinguinha, Nunes Garcia, Alberto Nepomuceno, and Radamés Gnattali. The collection is cataloged in MadCat, where it can be searched by composer, title, etc., or under Acervo Funarte Musica Brasileira to get an overview of each title.