Below is another abstract for the AMMI's International Conference,
May 5th, 2013.

Franco Severi - AMMI Associazione musica meccanica italiana
http://www.museomusicalia.it/ 

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Carlo Bianchini - Pietro Zappalà
University of Pavia, Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage
(Cremona)

The collection of piano rolls of the Department of Musicology:
importance of the fund and criteria for its description

The Department of Musicology houses a collection of nearly 1000
piano rolls.  Most of them were produced by FIRST, the most important
company of perforated rolls at the time, which had its headquarters
in Cremona.  This collection is perhaps the wider core of FIRST's
production concentrated today in a single institution.  Together
with the publishers' catalogs, this fund is an essential basis to
reconstruct and appreciate the importance of the Cremonese company.
To ensure its conservation a digitization project (in collaboration
with AMMI) has been planned, as well as a cataloging action.

The cataloging of the piano rolls requires a preliminary study on
descriptive criteria.  The aim is to examine the morphological
peculiarities of the rolls and to establish a correct and complete
description within the cataloging current rules.  In fact, they do
not explicitly cover this type of material: it is therefore necessary
to propose appropriate amendments to them.  A subsequent evolution of
the study will allow to find appropriate descriptive criteria also for
other types of support for the mechanical music.