It began in 1949 as a collection of about 800 books, a few musical score sheets, and a couple of 78-rpm recordings, all of it it stored in two small rooms, maintained by Stanford's first music librarian, Edward Colby (1912-2006). Decades later, Colby's paper and wax Music Library has developed in to an innovative musical reference institution housing 15,000 circulating CDs and more than 124,000 books and scores, a number of which are increasingly becoming available electronically via Stanford's online catalog, Socrates.