Music Librarianship at the Turn of the Century

Citation

Duckett, B. (2002), "Music Librarianship at the Turn of the Century", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 1, pp. 45-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.1.45.9

One sign of a good book (or a bad one!) is when the librarian‐reviewer sins and starts to write in it! Reserve and good breeding is lost and sacrilege committed when the author’s comments seem so apposite and so stimulating to the reader that a threshold is crossed. Out comes the pen and highlighter and the book is personalised. This book – a collection of 13 essays first published in the March 2000 issue of Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association – is just such a (good) book.

First, we learn that collection development and management has seen the downgrading and loss of collection specialists, tighter budgets, and the proliferation of new subjects and formats. To the popular myths that print would disappear entirely; that librarians would become information brokers; and that access rather than ownership would become the norm, experience has shown that acid‐free paper is a more stable medium than the digital document; music resources need librarians to interpret them; and that access only comes at a price. Future trends will be more co‐operative acquisition, sustained collecting, and for the music librarian to be “arbiter of the old and the new – both in the context of music and musical scholarship, and in the various formats of the information media”.

These observations are picked up in the essay on preservation. If the problems of acid paper and ozalid copying have been solved by producing better paper, de‐acidification and silver halide microfilm, the rush to digitization is a preservation disaster of the first magnitude – computer discs and magnetic tapes are more transient, even, than most paper; equipment is expensive and soon obsolescent; and funds are diverted from preservation microfilming and environmental upgrading to produce short‐term Web‐based information needs. The future role of the music librarian is triage – the need to decide which materials to preserve and which to lose.

Despite the undoubted advances in co‐operative cataloguing using networked computer systems we still have not achieved what we want. “I predict that this new Babel of metadatabases and Integrated Library Systems (ILSs) will eventually lead to a renewed call for simplification and standardization, at least in libraries.” And “since physical browsing will be impossible in the digital‐library environment … I would expect to see a renewed interest in systematic classification … ”.

The verities remain: description of, and access to, materials. On these we still have a long way to go. This downbeat view of a cataloguer is shared by the essayist on technology and reinforces what most of the other contributors observe – that the IT hype bubble has burst. The following factors all contribute to a lot of worried music librarians: the constant need to upgrade; loss of control to commercial providers; poor interoperability; loss of intuitive indexing; the expense; and the loss of staff to pay for it all, “The fantasy of a fully digitized library … would require … [a] worldwide abolition of intellectual property law – a political impossibility – as well as unimaginably vast costs associated with scanning the untold millions of printed volumes in our stack.” We must adopt a “best‐case” scenario, stake our claim, and turn the dream into reality. The following paper follows up on copyright and covers problems of digital copying, commercial interests, definition, licensing and the need to measure use.

Turning to the essay on reference, I found a thoroughly entertaining, even conspiratorial, piece on real‐life reference work. A look at the electronic revolution elicits the view that: “The computerization of the planet has brought more, not fewer, questions to the reference desk”, though credit is given to IT for speeding up research (“if you know what you are doing”!); providing access to certain kinds of information that printed sources cannot; databases are faster to use and more current than printed sources; interlibrary loan is faster; and “Web sites, so colorful and magnetic to ... the generation brought up on Sega and Nintendo, also hold the promise of an unprecedented currency of information”. The downside, such as the need to evaluate content and the increasing demands on staff to keep up with the hardware, are noted, and “we are still lacking some obvious reference books”. My highlighter was busy as the author analyzed the pressures on reference staff and worried over future recruitment.

The theme of reference works we lack is taken up in the following essay on reference sources. After a look at the landmark publications of the past 50 years, the present scene and the future are considered. I liked the déjà vu syndrome in which the trail of hyperlinks keep leading to the same resource. Among topics for future consideration are researchers ignoring print sources altogether; the need for Web sites to be classified and organized; the development of multimedia databases; the spread of Western music and “the need to explicate this music within cultures far outside those of Europe and North America”.

The author on the user education seemed puzzled as to why so few music librarian educators discussed matters of mutual concern on the MLA electronic discussion group, compared to the animated discussions in earlier print forums. As ever, the new technology looms large, whether it is the need to explain, yet again, to the neophyte student the difference between on‐line catalogues and the Internet, or the need for librarians to be Web designers. The work of the Music Libraries Association’s Education Committee and the Bibliographic Instruction Subcommittee is well chronicled, while the distinction between skills‐based and tools‐based approaches is well made. The chapter on music publishing highlights the decline of musical literacy, reduced paper sales, and the loss of local publisher’s agents. Distribution of music through the Internet was seen as the future for libraries. But not for sound recordings, writes the next contributor. Even though the new technology has made the recording more fundamental that the score, and hence librarians must collect accordingly, the transmission of sound recordings via the Internet is not yet a threat due to reasons of quality, cost and slowness.

Surprisingly, the antiquarian music market continues to flourish. The decline of institutional acquisitions budgets and the growing commercial availability of digitally‐enhanced originals is balanced by an increasingly wealthy core of private buyers, more material coming on to the market from libraries de‐accessioning non‐core collections, and a widening field of collecteana. If “Ye Olde Musick Shoppe” with dim and dusty corners has gone, then the development of high profile auctions with their glossy and detailed catalogues, the Internet opening up the global market, even auctions on the Internet, are driving things forward.

The author of the essay on music archives tries to be upbeat also: the new century will be “an exciting one for music archives”. The Internet has meant that “even the most modest music archive could mount its finding aids online for the world to see”. But “easily accessible descriptive information is a double‐edged sword”. More researchers are demanding access; the casual Web surfer from afar places more work on the archivist; while more use damages original material. Digitization of the originals is lessening physical wear, but “technologies become obsolete with increasing frequency”. Added to this are the traditional problems of curatorship, the difficulty of describing collections and the unpredictability of use. Then consider our contemporary penchant for using the telephone, unsaved e‐mail and composing direct onto electronic systems: “Never before have we created or collected so much information on vehicles of such increasingly short life span”.

The final essay is on education for music librarianship. Once a music specialist, librarians now need technical skills of a non‐musical variety, work in an interdisciplinary environment, and need to keep keeping up to date. Continuing education, paraprofessionalism, distance learning, and Web‐based teaching are becoming standard. The electronic music library is the future. Indeed, in his summing up, the editor suggests that we need to review our idea of what, exactly, music is!

I am no music librarian, but I read this collection of essays from cover to cover with profit and enjoyment. The instruction to authors to consider the recent past, the present, and the near future, has been adhered to, and what we have is 13 thoughtful, lucid, and challenging essays which are a valuable contribution to professional thinking.