american music libraries and librarianship: challenges for the nineties

American Music Libraries and Librarianship: Challenges for the NinetiesAuthor(s): Mary Wallace DavidsonSource: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Sep., 1993), pp. 13-22Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/898685 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 17:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.141 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 17:50:38 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mulias

http://www.jstor.org/stable/898685?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


AMERICAN MUSIC LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP:

CHALLENGES FOR THE NINETIES BY MARY WALLACE DAVIDSON

o

A dozen years have passed since Ruth Watanabe's thoughtful and comprehensive survey of trends and predictions for the decade just past was published in this journal.' Central to her discussion was the statement that the challenge of the eighties:

must be a period of the reassessment of library values and of changes aimed at the speedy, accurate, and efficient access to pertinent information, made available to the greatest possible number of clients. While collection development is still an important function, putting present resources to work at their fullest capacity is perhaps even more important.2

We are still struggling with this challenge, whose dimensions have mean- while only grown in size and complexity. The present essay attempts to touch upon those changes that have had, and will continue to have, the greatest impact on libraries and librarianship.

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AND CONSERVATION: OWNERSHIP

"Access, not ownership" have become the buzz-words of the nineties- often too uncritically, but perhaps less so in music libraries, which cir- culate performance materials protected not only by sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Law, but also by section 110. This slogan will nevertheless create a false sense of security about our ability to locate and acquire older editions of music for our clients until we begin to pay more attention, not to our own institutional libraries, but to what might be called our logical national music collection. A recent informal survey, undertaken by Sibley Music Library Conservator Ted Honea, suggests that none of the academic research libraries questioned had the time or the money to do anything but discard brittle or worn-out performance editions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If these libraries no longer own such editions, where will we be able to access this

Mary Wallace Davidson, Librarian of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, directs its Sibley Music Library, and is a past president of the Music Library Association.

1. Ruth Watanabe, "American Music Libraries and Music Librarianship: An Overview in the Eight- ies," Notes 38 (1981): 239-56.

2. Ibid., 244.

13



NOTES, September 1993

music to meet the already increasing demand for it on the part of our more sophisticated scholar-performers?

What is (or should be) the "core" collection in music libraries that serve institutions and/or clientele of particular characteristics? The Music Li- brary Association (hereafter, MLA) and the National Association of Schools of Music have still been unable to answer these questions, perhaps for good reasons. Where are our peripheral or more specialized collections, and how might we best preserve and provide access to them?

In the early 1980s the now defunct Music Program of the Research Libraries Group undertook to compare and analyze, within closely de- fined subsets of the Library of Congress M classification, both the existing collection strengths and the anticipated level of buying intensities of its members' libraries.3 This conspectus study, together with the group's effort to identify works that should be reprinted and to en- courage publishers to do so, has had little impact beyond those few libraries involved. MLA's Subcommittee on Collection Assessment of the Resource Sharing and Collection Development Committee put forth a proposal calling for a comprehensive national collection assessment program for music, involving both quantitative (using OCLC's database) and qualitative research methods using existing directories and surveys, but such studies have so far not been undertaken.4 With respect to directories, the U.S. branch of the International Association of Music Li- braries, Archives, and Documentation Centres should renew its efforts to find someone willing to update the excellent directory of North Amer- ican research libraries by Marian Kahn, Helmut Kallmann, and Charles Lindahl5-or better yet, a separate publication that would serve as a revision of this work together with the more detailed directory of Amer- ican resources in libraries, archives and private collections of all sizes, compiled by D. W. Krummel, Jean Geil, Doris Dyen and Deane Root,6 and Ann Brieglab's North American directory of ethnomusicological recording collections,7 broadened to include ethnomusicological materials in all formats.

3. This was part of the larger project described by Nancy E. Gwinn and Paul H. Mosher, "Coor- dinating Collection Development: The RLG Conspectus," College & Research Libraries 44 (1983): 128- 40. The results are available online in RLIN, and print-outs from various dates are generally available in participating libraries.

4. Joan D. Kunselman, Peggy Daub, and Marion Taylor, "Toward Describing and Assessing the National Music Collection," Notes 43 (1986): 7-13.

5. Marian Kahn and Helmut Kallmann, Canada; Charles Lindahl, United States, Directory of Music Research Libraries, Rita Benton, general editor, Repertoire International des Sources Musicales, Series C, v. 1, 2nd rev. ed. (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1983).

6. D. W. Krummel et al., Resources of American Music History: A Directory of Source Materials from Colonial Times to World War II, Music in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).

7. Ann Briegleb, ed., Directory of Ethnomusicological Sound Recording Collections in the U.S. and Canada, Special Series, 2 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Society for Ethnomusicology, 1971).

14



American Music Libraries and Librarianship 15

The music library community could benefit in the nineties from the current mandate of the National Endowment for the Humanities to doc- ument and preserve special collections at risk. Its emphasis is, however, upon collection stabilization rather than artifact restoration. Costs of digital imaging and indexing are coming down, and those manufacturers developing this technology are listening to our concerns about perma- nence of both the medium and the "playback" equipment. Nevertheless we cannot, nor should not, preserve it all, and the task of wise selection, and reaching local and national consensus about this, becomes urgent.

The concept of a logical national collection, organized in its diversity, becomes even more pressing when we consider current trends in the music publishing industry. The major firms are already beginning to charge libraries for their catalogues, while giving them away at conven- tions of music educators. Now that digital production and transmission are a reality, and that rental and licensing fees produce more revenue than print publishing for most firms, it almost seems as though music libraries could become part museum (of crumbly old editions) and part juke-box, or some sort of licensed terminal center. If the distinctions between issue, state, and edition are difficult for music bibliographers now, they promise to be nightmarish when constant revision becomes practical and truly imperceptible.

CATALOGUES AND COMPUTERS: ACCESS

The challenge of the nineties for access to our own and other libraries' collections is engendered in large part by rapid changes in computer technology and communications. The symbiotic relationship between creative works, scholarship, and communication technology is not new -in fact it is at least as old as cuneiform tablets, the use of papyrus and vellum for writing, the invention of moveable type, engraving, lithog- raphy, etc. All of these new technologies in their time suddenly and vastly increased the relative amounts of creative and reflective works, as well as the obligation on the part of libraries to provide access to them.

The compelling aspects of the current technologies are: 1) the rates of their change, 2) the speed with which information can be communicated to anyone, anywhere, with the right connecting signals, inex- pensively, and 3) the quantity of information that can be communicated (and lost) because of its compressed size. What appears to be changing in our library catalogues is the degree to which the role of descriptive bibliography is giving way to concerns for new forms of access in the on-line environment based on binomial rather than hierarchical concepts. Something matches, or it doesn't. If it does, it might for the wrong, or at least seemingly inappropriate, reason; if it doesn't, it is lost rather




than available for a serendipitous encounter a few cards away. Oscar Sonneck's understanding in 1904 that music cataloguing is a bit different from book cataloguing because a musical work exists in so many versions-a phenomenon to which he lightly referred as "the traditional peculiarities of composers and publishers" -is just beginning to be ex- plored by the more empirical researchers among us, notably Richard Smiraglia and Sherry Vellucci, in the implications of this fact for linking the various versions of the same work in on-line catalogues.8 The linking of specific performers with individual works in audio or visual items comprising more than one work, and the ability to display this relationship in our on-line catalogues, was successfully demonstrated in the experimental formats created by Mary Lou Little at Harvard Univer- sity's Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library prior to, and in cooperation with, the Library of Congress's adaptation of the MARC formats for music, but abandoned in their final form. Perhaps it was an idea ahead of its time that could be recaptured, just as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ill-fated Project Intrex, to microfilm periodical articles together with light-encoded cues for subject indexing and full-text display, initiated in the late sixties and abandoned in the mid-seventies, has been reincarnated in the current digital imaging projects at Kodak, Xerox, and elsewhere. These latter developments bear watching closely as har- bingers of great and rapid change to both music collections and their cataloguing.

Quick and easy keyword indexing abounds, as does the more logically sophisticated Boolean searching of single terms or adjacent phrases in library catalogues endowed with sufficient disk space. But the wide- spread expansion of interdisciplinary and cultural concerns among our musicians and scholars continues to require greater attention to our subject indexing. We now differentiate between explicit theory (imposed and articulated) and implicit theories (perceived without the interven- tion of language). Although these phenomena might first have been observed in research in the social sciences, they have long existed in the non-verbal languages and ritual forms of art, music, and dance. Non- verbal evidence must be captured by audio and visual technologies: films, photographs, audio- and videotapes, prints, and works of art. These in turn can best be made intellectually available through auto- mated indexing by means of sophisticated thesauri, not mere keyword

8. Oscar Sonneck, "Music," in Charles A. Cutter, Rules for a Dictionary Catalog, 4th ed. (Washington 1904), p. 138; reprinted in Reader in Music Librarianship, ed. Carol June Bradley (Washington, D.C.: Microcard Editions Books, 1973), p. 146; Richard P. Smiraglia, Music Cataloging: The Bibliographic Con- trol of Printed and Recorded Music in Libraries (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1989), passim; Sherry Vellucci's dissertation (Ph.D., Columbia University) is in progress, and her ideas have been presented in various venues.

16




title indexing. We need these thesauri in order to proceed with providing access to such vast uncatalogued resources as our sheet music collections, for example. A great deal of this work has already been ac- complished, especially by art librarians, but needs to be understood more thoroughly and expanded upon by music subject specialists.9 Dis- cussions at recent meetings of the Subject Access Subcommittee of MLA's Bibliographic Control Committee suggest that members are well aware of developments in other fields, and intent on making good use of them for music. Indeed, supported by the Council on Library Re- sources, a preliminary music thesaurus was compiled in 1991 by con- verting music headings from Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and from the Dewey Decimal Classification (20th edition) to a thesaurus construction software program (ARIS) currently capable of displaying the terms in unique word, keyword, and hierarchical arrange- ments. Ultimately this research is intended to assist the user to broaden, narrow, or redirect a specific search, and possibly to serve as a guide for the future development of the LCSH themselves.10

The impact of speed has been greater, both positively and negatively, than anyone could have predicted, and has raised our collective expectations, perhaps deceptively. Consider this all-too-frequent scenario: a faculty member rushes in between lessons or classes with a last minute idea for the next student(s), or a newspaper critic rushes over during lunch hour to obtain a score for the evening's orchestra concert. A fast search ensues, and for whatever reason fails. If there is time or imag- ination, our client makes a second try, but this strike-out only serves to confirm the truth of the first. In either case the client assumes the de- sired item does not exist here and leaves. The "whatever reason" then becomes a crucial bit of information lost in haste, at present completely unrecoverable if the client dials into the catalogue from studio, office, or home. We need to devise ways of studying on-line music catalogue searches automatically and empirically, to determine these "whatever reasons," to see what the implications of this information are for both cataloguing practices and bibliographic instruction. These findings may well cause a revision to the excellent statement of requirements for

9. See for example: Art and Architecture Thesaurus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and its Supplement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), both issued electronically as Authority Reference Tool (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Betz Parker, LC Thesaurus of Terms for Graphic Materials (Washington, D.C.: Cataloging Distribution Service, Library of Congress, 1987)

10. Harriette Hemmasi, "Notes on Research: ARIS Music Thesaurus: Another View of LCSH," Li- brary Resources and Technical Services 36 (1992): 487-503. ARIS is the acronym for Uames D.] Anderson [and Frederick A.] Rowley Information Systems, c/o James D. Anderson, P.O. Box 38, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.




on-line catalogues containing music information, a statement prepared by members of MLA's Subcommittee on Music Automation in 1986.11

Not all the access issues concern technology per se however. Partly as a result of technology, and partly as a result of increased numbers and types of acquisitions, catalog departments are under pressure to re-eval- uate their procedures and increase their levels of production. Creative solutions are being sought and implemented in many departments where online acquisitions systems integrated with the online catalog have completely changed earlier patterns and work-flow. Libraries might also consider wider use of archival principles in processing collections, especially those of contemporary composers. Large research collections open to the public could well adopt the University of Chicago's model of a separate collection of lesser used materials, arranged by accession number on open shelves, with item-level brief entries in the on-line catalog.

COLLECTION SERVICES: THE IMPACT OF CONTEXTUAL AND CROSS-CULTURAL INQUIRY

In the dim dark ages when I was in college, all of our instruction in literary and musical analysis was based on the so-called New Criticism (already pretty old by then!): "Art for Art's Sake." We analyzed a poem or a symphony as an art form in and of itself, in nearly complete isolation from its surroundings. The music librarian then (Helen Joy Sleeper, in fact) received no request from me for help because we all purchased our own scores to annotate. Our attention was focused upon our own inter- pretation, resonances, and the musical understanding we brought to the work, but not to where this particular work stood in the life of the author, the author's historical situation or frame of reference, the meaning of the poet's or musician's language to listeners, and the impact of the listeners' reactions in turn upon the creator. These latter concerns were considered bad form at the collegiate level and beyond.

All of this changed substantially in the late eighties and early nineties with the increasing acceptance and maturity of interdisciplinary studies on the part of our academic music societies, and their practitioners' borrowing from the analytic techniques of other disciplines: decon- structionism, Marxism, gender issues, and the like. Recent "exaugural" speeches of retiring presidents of the American Musicological Society (hereafter AMS) in the 1980s have all commented on the rapid expansion of interdisciplinary concerns during this decade,12 further docu-

11. Lenore Coral et al., "Automation Requirements for Music Information," Notes 43 (1986): 14-18. 12. Richard Crawford in 1988, H. Colin Slim in 1990, and H. Wiley Hitchcock in 1992.

18




mented by a series of discussions examining the study of music-begun at Cornell in 1986, continued at the 1987 annual meeting of the AMS, and by the publication of Disciplining Music, edited by Philip Bohlman and Katherine Bergeron, together with the conference on the same sub-

ject convened in May 1992 at the University of Chicago.13 At the most recent combined meetings of the American Musicological

Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomu- sicology in Oakland, California in November 1990, there were several sessions that invited contributions from members of all three societies around a single topic, for example, Time, during which scientific concepts of time in both its two-dimensional (linear) and three-dimensional (non-linear) forms were discussed knowledgeably and at length.14 At the same meetings an abstract of a paper by Lawrence Kramer on the rel- evance of gender to Schumann's Carnaval spoke of embracing "the new musicology that tries to situate musical structures within their larger cultural context." The paper was entitled, "Carnaval, Cross-Dressing and Women in the Mirror," a reference to the piece's contextual roots in the earlier Commedia dell'arte.15 In either case, how would one find either the musical or the social concepts expressed by using the so-called KWIC (Key Word [even] In Context) title searching, assuming the papers had now been published, and that we had an up-to-date periodical index in the music library?

Music reference librarians still have the same mission as always: to bring people together with books, only now we substitute the word, information. There is a sense that librarians are fast becoming information brokers, and if they cannot rise to the challenge, the "information systems managers" can do it for them. Music librarians are hard put to choose where they will spend their energies, whether to keep up with these new substantive developments in their field, or the "packages" in which they arrive, and of course they must do both, as they always have. This is the dichotomy about which Bradford Young wrote in his survey

13. Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ann Morrison, "The Undisciplined Muse: Music among the Fields of Knowledge, University of Chicago, 29-30 May 1992: A Conference Report," Journal of Musicology 10 (1992): 405-15.

14. "Time and Music: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Temporal Study (Combined)," organized by Mar- got Fassler; Pieter van den Toorn, Chair. Papers presented included: 1) "The Qawwali and the Puzzle of Time in Indian-Muslim Music," by Rogula Burckhardt Qureshi; "Time, History, and Exegesis in Later Medieval Music-Dramas," by Margot Fassler; "Bach and the Pursuit of Contemplative Time," by Laurence Dreyfus; and "The Myth of Linearity: Concepts of Time in Post-War Music," by Christopher F. Hasty. Abstracts of Papers Read at the Joint Meetings of the American Musicological Society, 56th annual meeting ... November 7 through November 11, 1990, Oakland, California, pp. 27-29.

15. Lawrence Kramer, "Carnaval, Cross-Dressing, and Women in the Mirror," paper presented in the session, "Gender Roles and Ambiguity," in Abstracts of Papers Read at Joint Meetings of the American Musicological Society, 56th annual meeting ... November 7 through 11, 1990, Oakland California, pp. 8-9.




of programs for the training of music librarians, the dichotomy that we insist on perpetuating.16 Indeed some say that music librarians are not just information specialists (retrievers), but possibly one of the last branches of librarianship where knowledge of subject content will re- main in demand for all services. I certainly hope so.

Very few of the discoveries of artificial intelligence have been applied to the development of interactive systems and database search techniques specifically for students in institutions of higher education in general, much less for music students, although the literature of search- strategy research among young children is richly endowed. If the information or social scientists do not take this up soon, we may have to do it ourselves. In a sense this is the same point that was made above about on-line library catalogues, but it has even greater application for developing interactive programs in library instruction, as well as the CD- ROM and on-line indexes we need.

Changes in both the discipline and the technology with which we provide access to it will bring thorough revision to our courses in music bibliography, especially those taught to graduate students. No longer do these students, steeped in the mysteries of arcane, hierarchical subject headings, need to plow through volume after volume of national bib- liographies, library catalogs, and periodical indices. But they do need to be taught the difference between conceptual and keyword searching, and the relevant search strategies of each method. They need more emphasis on evaluating what they find, both at the computer and at the source itself. We can no longer confine our teaching to sources in the music library, especially for those students who are in doctoral programs, who will need an introduction at least to the basic bibliographic resources in the humanities and social sciences. Either we bone up ourselves, or form teaching partnerships with bibliographers in other disciplines.

Interlibrary loan transactions at the Sibley Music Library quadrupled in the year we converted our bibliographic records for chamber music to OCLC. More recently we find that our borrowing is increasing as our lending decreases. Analysis of these transactions reveals that most of the borrowing is not for music, but for the related interdisciplinary studies described above. As we contemplate digital scanning of graphic images (scores) 3nd audio signals (recordings) to enhance these services, we en- ter a whole new arena of improved images and more rapid transmission-as well as continually increasing expectations from our clients for these improvements, well ahead of the date we can provide them.

16. Bradford Young, "Education for Music Librarianship." Notes 40 (1984): 510-28.

20




Most music libraries are expanding their public services to include the use of microcomputers in some way other than as hardware for reference software. Although now five years old, Robert Skinner's article on planning issues is not outdated by any means, and is still highly rec- ommended.17 Of utmost importance is his advice to coordinate these activities with the planning either of curricular initiatives elsewhere in the school, or with public service objectives in other departments, especially where hypermedia applications might be duplicated. We can be sure demands on the music library for these services will increase as faculty become more expert in designing their own software, based on library materials. Already the Music Research Library at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center has provided such equipment for the use of its patrons in both passive and active applications.

ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES

All current music librarians are going to need additional training of some kind, either in short spurts on the job, in more extensive institutes, or through embarking on advanced degrees in other fields. Some will want to acquire research skills in statistical methods or cognition, or strategies for fund-raising, or new management skills, or newer edu- cational media soft- and hardware, or the successor to Total Quality Management when it arrives. Many will be able to find this instruction at their own institutions, while others will need to invest resources as well as time to travel elsewhere. In addition to keeping up with developing computer capabilities, librarians must also cope knowledgeably with changes in telecommunications. We must never find ourselves, even by default, outside the arena of those who design the technologies upon which we now depend so heavily.

Many, if not most, music libraries are now housed in buildings that lack the space necessary for both stack expansion and wiring for the new technologies. Although Ann Basart developed criteria for weeding books on music and identifying candidates for remote storage at the University of California at Berkeley in 1977,18 no one has attempted similar statements for scores and sound recordings. Older collections are plagued with rapidly disintegrating materials printed on brittle paper. Their parent institutions have reduced budgets for current operating expenditures and find nowhere to turn for capital funds. They are serv- ing patrons who show increasing signs of stress and impatience in an

17. Robert Skinner, "Microcomputers in the Music Library, Notes 45 (1988): 7-14. 18. Ann Basart, "Criteria for Weeding Books in a University Music Library, Notes 36 (1980): 819-36.




increasingly competitive and demanding musical and scholarly world. The times call for wisdom, knowing the right questions to ask, and an incredible sense of humor.

CONCLUSION

Recent changes in scholarship and teaching result primarily from the growth of interdisciplinary studies, both contextual and cross-cultural, and the continuing opportunities presented by new computer technologies, such as hypermedia. The impact on libraries concerns chiefly the need to collect more kinds of materials, including the databases scholars themselves create, and to provide intellectual access to vastly increased numbers of items, and physical access to increasingly non-owned materials. Providing intellectual access includes training our clients of all sorts how to anticipate "drop-outs" (not students, but extant bibliographic entries not found by the terms searched), outsmart the key words, and cope with too much as well as too little information retrieved.

Music librarians are simply going to have to become collaborators, first of all with the faculty or town officials, in these times of budget con- straint, so that we move forward together with the same priorities. In some cases we may even have to prod them to recognize their own needs. Not too long ago I learned a new verb from another library director: "to insert," as in looking for opportunities to insert the library into academic or civic outreach prcgrams wherever possible. Notice that this does not mean inserting myself on this or that committee, but inserting the library as problem-solver when appropriate. This is a healthy concept, one that ensures the organic relationship (to which we all aspire) between the mission of the institution and that of the music library.

22



american music libraries and librarianship: challenges for the nineties

Documents