International Association of Music Libraries Annual Meeting

Library Hi Tech News

ISSN: 0741-9058

Article publication date: 1 October 2002

120

Citation

Vick, L. (2002), "International Association of Music Libraries Annual Meeting", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919jac.002

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited


International Association of Music Libraries Annual Meeting

Liza Vick

The International Association of Music Libraries (IAML) Annual Conference took place in Berkeley, California, 4-9 August, 2002. Additional information about the IAML is found on their Web site at: www.cilea.it/music/iaml/iamlhome.htm Most of the panel discussions, scholarly and library presentations focused on bibliographic issues, access and collections issues with an international scope.

Naturally many sessions and speakers addressed digital issues and that is what is summarized in this brief conference report. This is not intended to be a comprehensive survey, but a sampling of the sessions that I attended.

There are numerous projects being developed in music libraries or by music librarians in conjunction with scholars and systems experts. From the range of speakers it is clear that they encompass a spectrum, from the practical task-based projects to sophisticated software development and enormous digitization efforts.

One example of a practical application is a project underway by George Hill (Baruch College, CUNY) and Elizabeth Davis (Columbia University). They have begun an analytical indexing project on the Collected Editions, Historical Series and Sets and Monuments of Music: A Bibliography by George Hill and Norris Stephens. This important print volume has been a valuable tool for music librarians for years, as an access tool for composer collected works editions. Hill and Davis have a prototype database underway that contains approximately 135,000 records from the print edition. When this project is completed it will be an even more valuable online reference resource for music and arts libraries.

Another interesting and larger-scale project is the formation of an international musical performance index, led by David Day of Brigham Young University. This impressive project intends to gather data on musical performances such as concert programs, libretti, press reviews, and related ephemera. Day envisions this as a collaborative effort between many musical institutions (libraries, archives, scholars, students, performers). The resulting database(s) would be searchable by artist, role, title, venue, composer, creator, scene designer, performance chronology, and much other valuable data. It may also include digitized audio and video of performances. These primary and secondary sources of data would be entered into a relational database with links to collections and institutions when necessary.

This project already has the cooperation of many institutions and should prove invaluable to music scholars and librarians doing performance-based research. For more information, visit the Draft User's Guide Web site (http://music.lib.byu.edu/ProgramsProj/manual.html).

Several other groups of projects were addressed in group presentations (two to three speakers per session). One of these was entitled "Digital library stores," presented by the Audio Visual Commission of IAML. "MusicAustralia: a digital strategy for Australian music" (Robyn Holmes, National Library of Australia) was one of the projects shared. It emerged from the need for access to Australian music scores and audio files online and is a collaborative Web-based music service in pilot stages.

The goal is to provide digital content and network resources and is led by national institutions such as the National Library of Australia, ScreenSound Australia, Australian Music Centre and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Catherine Owen, of Performing Arts Data Service, University of Glasgow, presented on, "The art of touching the keyboard: collecting digital resources for music scholars." This project covers data from music, theatre, dance, film, and broadcast arts and involves the digital storage and management of audio, video, text, databases and multimedia in an interoperable environment. The third speaker on this program was Anthony Gordon of the British Library National Sound Archive who addressed the preservation of digital resources. Gordon's approach was more theoretical, analyzing the problems of metadata and swiftly changing formats.

The Library of Congress, American Memory program has long been at the vanguard of digital collections. Susan Manus presented a paper at a session on American Archives (Archives and Documentation Centres Branch) about her work in coordinating several music-related digitization projects. She spoke about the less technical aspects of the processes behind selecting materials for digitization. Some of the collections presented on American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html) include Music for the Nation (nineteenth-century sheet music), Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Fine, Civil War Band Music and several others still in development.

The Commission on Service and Training and the Research Libraries Branch also presented a fascinating project, from the University of California, Los Angeles. Stephen Davison and Gordon Theil (music librarians) titled their talk, "The songs of long ago: building a digital archive of sheet music and audio." They are in the process of building three substantial digital projects, of which two were addressed in detail, the Digital Archive of Popular American Music (nineteenth and twentieth-century sheet music) and the Frontera-Strachwitz collection. The latter is a digital audio archive of Mexican-American music.

The third collection is a jazz archive and popular music repository. The UCLA librarians are navigating digital issues such as OAI harvesting, varying standards, both for digitization and for metadata (Dublin Core, MARC, EAD), as well as format, copyright, licensing, and display capabilities.

The next IAML meeting will be in Tallinn, Estonia 6-11 July, 2003 (www.utlib.ee/Fonoteek/IAML2003/).

Liza Vick (lvick@uci.edu) is the Music and Dance Librarian at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California, USA.

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