Sibley Music Library is the largest and most comprehensive academic music library in North America, with total holdings of nearly 750,000 separate items. The general stacks, which are spread across the library’s three floors, hold approximately 375,000 catalogued books and scores as well as current and archived issues of more than 2,000 music periodicals.

One of the library’s greatest strengths is the comprehensiveness of its holdings of late 19th- and early 20th-century scores by European and American composers. The library also maintains a robust collection of critical and study scores and facsimile editions as well as extensive scholarship on music theory, historical musicology, and performance practice. Current collecting aims to diversify and widen this repertoire by building comprehensive collections of works by composers of color.

Some highlights include:

• The Institute of Music Leadership Collection, containing more than 100 reference books on music careers, entrepreneurship, and leadership
• The Edward H. Tarr Collection, more than 1,100 scores for brass instruments 
• Current subscriptions to 300 music periodicals in many languages

Sibley Music Library holds more than 100,000 audio and visual recordings spanning several media formats (LP, cassette tape, CD, VHS, DVD), and the library also subscribes to 9 databases of streamed audio and video recordings. Among the library’s major recordings collections and acquisitions are:

• The Ron Carter Audio Archive and Collection, containing nearly 800 jazz recordings
• The Vincent Lenti Collection of more than 1,300 audio and video recordings, primarily of piano music
• The Eastman Audio Archive, containing more than 35,000 recordings of performances at the Eastman School of Music, the earliest dating from 1933

As a service to scholars and musicians, the Sibley Music Library actively digitizes scores and books in its collections that are in the public domain. The library’s digitization efforts were kick started in 2009 and 2011 with two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that funded the digitization of more than 19,000 items. To date, more than 30,000 scores and books from the library’s collections have been digitized and are available on the University of Rochester’s free, public online digital repository, UR Research.