special topic: public libraries || are public music libraries on the road to full democracy?

ARE PUBLIC MUSIC LIBRARIES ON THE ROAD TO FULL DEMOCRACY?Author(s): Hanneke KuiperSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 57, No. 3, Special Topic: Public Libraries (July-September2010), pp. 229-235Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512142 .

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ARE PUBLIC MUSIC LIBRARIES ON THE ROAD TO FULL DEMOCRACY?

Hanneke Kuiper1

English Abstract Public libraries around the world have faced a number of challenges over the past decade and the

pressures of modern life, such as decreasing numbers of loans, stretched budgets, and the need for

marketing, are changing the traditional aspects of the music library in the public library system. Public libraries, however, remain important in the lives of many people, providing open access and

professional guidance to knowledge for all ages.

This issue provides an overview of the international world of public music libraries from Turkey to Japan and offers some innovative solutions to problems we all face in our libraries, public, private, or academic.

German Abstract

Im vergangenen Jahrzehnt wurden Öffentliche Bibliotheken mit einer ganzen Reihe von

Herausforderungen konfrontiert. Gerade die Musikbibliotheken in den Öffentlichen Bibliotheks

systemen stehen aktuell besonders unter Druck: Sinkende Ausleihzahlen, verringerte

Anschaffungsetats und die Notwendigkeit verstärkter Öffentlichkeitsarbeit verändern die traditionelle Rolle der Musikbibliothek innerhalb der Welt der Öffentlichen Bibliothek. Trotzdem sind und bleiben Öffentliche Bibliotheken ein wichtiger Bestandteil im Leben vieler Menschen, denn sie bieten für alle Altersgruppen freien Informationszugang und professionelle Beratung.

Diese Fontes-Ausgabe bietet einen Überblick über Öffentliche Musikbibliotheken weltweit - von der Türkei bis nach Japan - und zeigt einige innovative Lösungen für Probleme auf, denen wir uns

alle gegenüber sehen - in Öffentlichen, Wissenschaftlichen und privaten Bibliotheken.

French Abstract

Dans le monde entier, les bibliothèques publiques ont relevé un certain nombre de défis au cours

des dernières années. La pression liée aux modernités comme la baisse du nombre de prêts,

le resserrement des budgets et les besoins en termes de commercialisation transforment le mode

de fonctionnement traditionnel des bibliothèques publiques. Cependant, celles-ci jouent un rôle

important dans la vie de beaucoup de gens, étant donné leur facilité d'accès et la médiation culturelle

qui y est opérée pour toutes les personnes de tous âges.

Ce numéro propose un tour d'horizon des bibliothèques musicales publiques dans le monde, de la Turquie au Japon, et offre des solutions aux problèmes auxquels nous sommes tous confrontés

dans nos bibliothèques, qu'elles soient publiques, privées, ou académiques.

1. Hanneke Kuiper is Chair of the Public libraries Branch of IAML and is Information Manager (formerly

the Music librarian) and Coordinator of the Music Collections and Innovation at the Amsterdam Public Library,

Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has been on the board of the national IAML branch for 6 years and is a mem

ber of their Committee on Sheet Music. She chairs the national working group on music innovation of the larger

City libraries and of the national 'ask a librarian' team dealing with questions on music. She may be contacted

at [email protected].

229



230 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 57/3

Dutch Abstract

Het laatste decennium heeft Openbare bibliotheken wereldwijd voor een aantal uitdagingen gesteld en de druk vanuit de moderne maatschappij, zoals de dalende uitleencijfers, krimpende bud

gets en de noodzaak voor het implementeren van marketingtechnieken hebben de traditionele kan

ten van de muziekbibliotheekwerk binnen de Openbare bibliotheek doen veranderen. Toch blijft de

Openbare bibliotheek belangrijk in een mensenleven, als een voorziening die vrije toegang biedt tot kennis, alsmede professionele ondersteuning voor iedereen.

Deze uitgave biedt een overzicht van de internationale wereld van muziekbibliotheken van

Turkije tot Japan en biedt enige innovatieve oplossingen voor Problemen waarvoor wij alien staan in onze bibliotheken, zowel in openbare, als speciale of wetenschappelijke.

There are so many variations in size and circumstances in the Public Libraries sector within the borders of my own country, The Netherlands, as well in other countries and in different parts of the world, that we will focus on some developments that are specific for our sector.

Looking at the larger Public Libraries as we know them in many of the northern Euro

pean countries, we can see they were usually formed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the purpose of raising the standards of working class people. The Public Library soon became an instrument in the developing democracy (see also the UNESCO manifests, 1949,1972,1994).2

For a very long time, until the late 1950s, most Public libraries and therefore also most music library work stayed very much the same: it was about collecting books, catalogu ing, giving information, and lending or circulation. Music libraries have gone through major changes since then. The first change was the start of sound in our collections. Noise was a major new experience in our library world and with that came a new breed of col

leagues and library users, too. Some colleagues specialized in the new audio collections and many new audio collections came into existence, many without associated print mu sic collections. Formats never seemed to stop changing: LP to audio cassette and video

cassette, CD and DVD, and from physical formats to digital and streaming formats. A second major and more recent change was the transformation of our catalogues from

card catalogues to databases. Many of us will remember this very well: it changed the way we worked and manifested the need to harmonize the way we work.

The development of the internet and digital media influenced not only our daily work at a local level but also opened new possibilities for cooperating with colleagues at a dis tance on a daily basis.

The last major change involves both new threats and new possibilities, with Google and social technologies, globalization, change of culture, change of user needs, and change of user behavior. We will have to adapt to all that too.

We actually feel that we are now looking at a new phase in our library sector and there fore we know we need to develop new policies, not in the least because every institute has to justify its existence now more than ever. We now need marketers to help us find our user groups. We seem to live in a different world.

But what is really new? Wasn't the role of the Public Library always to enable citizens to take active part in the society? Hasn't the well-known working field for the Public libraries'

2. The manifests from 1949, 1972 and 1994 are available on the IFLA website: http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ ifla60/60-nieh.htm.



ARE PUBLIC MUSIC LIBRARIES ON THE ROAD TO FULL DEMOCRACY? 231

enabling efforts been about social inclusion, literacy, and lifelong learning ever since the

beginning? The labels may change, but the work we do often doesn't change at all. Of course we all tend to look at change from only one angle, afraid for loss of work

and afraid for the unknown. Why not look at it from a more positive angle and see the

opportunities? Is the way we organize our work not just a reflection of what happens in the rest of our

society? Take, for instance, self-service, a major item in public library policy that has been in

troduced in our libraries much later than in other sectors of our society. Most library users have now advanced from checking out their own books to helping themselves in search for information through the Internet. In the past couple of years, more and more people are using the Internet to gather and retrieve data. This shift to digital libraries has

greatly altered the average person's use of physical libraries, a change provided by new

technologies.

What about our goals?

The changes are not so much about the goals of the institution, but about the organiza tion that now needs to change to establish committing partnerships, in learning, educa

tional, leisure and cultural contexts, and to create services clearly defined by user needs.

Many libraries have now changed their policy from a traditional lending library to a more contemporary centre of information and participation. The 'new library building' also seems to reflect the way young people behave, like consumers in a multifunctional en

vironment. This library space - the third place - should offer lifelong learning opportuni ties, cultural experience, inspiration, and involvement.

The Public Library of Amsterdam (OBA) provides free access to information, knowl

edge, and culture for everyone by providing library services for education, participation,

meeting, and cultural awareness. In search of innovation at the OBA, an inspiring project called 'You Are Your Music' was developed in cooperation with the Technical University of Eindhoven and the OBA. The project has 3 parts: Soundcloud, designed by Joep Kalthoff, focuses on people finding new digital music at the physical location of the library and how the 'to be designed product and/or service' can stimulate social interaction and

community building. It works as follows: The first user shares his private music collection

to the community, the only condition for the broadcaster is that he lets the system stream

music on a virtual layer into the surroundings of the music library. The second role is that

of the listener. The listener is looking for new music and he can use the streamed content

and the spatiality of the library to find new music. Meeting, making contact with each

other, is a possibility, but not obligatory. The second project, Opus 4, designed by Mendel van Broekhuijsenm is a device for the

private browsing and exploring of digital music databases. Opus 4 is a mood-based music

exploration system. It is designed to overcome the existing boundaries between musical

genres by providing music recommendation based purely on signal analysis. Used as pri vate listening and browsing device, it inspires the visitors to find music that is on the

edges of their musical taste. The last project, DPE18, designed by Laura Duncker, is based on the music media that

visitors have collected in their (specially prepared) library bags. The technique makes it

possible to learn more about the musical taste of the visitor by looking at the changing




|j|j. Concept #1 * Directed music broadcasting find

ii ̂ 'V he music that you like by walking

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ILLUSTRATION 1 'You Are Your Music' (Photo by the Amsterdam Public Library)

colors of the special library bag. A charming way to make the acquaintance of a fellow

library user.

Apart from innovative projects, we, as librarians, also have to modernize, be proactive in our attitude to the outside world and take part in the new world of information man

agement and partnership. From giving information we will end up making information

ourselves, in a joint cooperation with our new library users and partners. We like to achieve this new way of working together with new partners, inside and outside our li

braries, by cross-pollination and participation. Partnerships help the library to serve outside the walls and to meet people where they

are on the web, in their homes, in schools, on the job, in the club, at the concert or the football match.

What about our core business?

Still, it is essential to hold on to our core business, too. In the middle of all these

changes we have to stay focused on the need to keep providing an excellent book service and additional electronic access. So all our collections must be maintained, comprehen sive, and with all the extras that makes our new library into a full and rich cultural envi ronment. There may be a contradiction here.

On the one hand institutions like to attract people to come to their libraries, stay there

longer and enjoy the environment, while a variation in cultural experience is offered, to

gether with rich collections, treasures and activities; on the other hand I have to conclude




there is no longer room for a strict library policy that looks solely at lending numbers, es

pecially in larger public libraries. We should learn how to treat our different collections more according to their specific nature.

There is a difference is how we should deal with our (sheet) music collections, being of a more historical nature, then with our collections on for instance health, law, technique or travel. These last examples being depending very much on current intelligence. Most of the larger music departments in older public libraries have special collections and local

treasure, they present to their users and on their website. An appealing and outstanding special collection of national importance is the Grieg collection in the Public Library of

Bergen, Norway, donated to the library by the composer himself. In The Netherlands we have begun working on developing 'étalagés' (display win

dows), where we exhibit our special collections online and present on digital information in a joint cooperation with new partners.

We also have a project to keep a large collection of printed music available for local use as well as for interlibrary loan, in cooperation with 14 larger cities (Plus libraries) and by forming about five special support collections (please see Table 1). This is based on al

ready existing access and special collections in these five libraries, which volunteer to

incorporate discarded titles from the other city libraries. There is only one condition: the title has to be catalogued in the national catalogue.

At present other libraries can also volunteer and join the group of 14. It will make the

position of printed music collections in public libraries stronger (in physical and digital formats), and means not every library will have to keep their own physical collection com

plete and will still have access to a larger physical collection. With the new developments in our collections we need new specialist librarians, too, in

different fields of knowledge such as music, who know how to deal with all kinds of for mats. So the organizations may need to normalize the way they now deal with librarians,

generalists, and specialists, and look for more variation in knowledge and skills for their

staff. We could even learn from the past here and reinstall the subject referent on certain

departments in the larger libraries, and also look for people with knowledge on current technical developments and on navigating and analyzing information, using the latest vari ation of tools.

Along with new kinds of librarians, we will also need a different kind of education as music librarians in Public libraries. But maybe we have to look at this from another angle and conclude that we could use more variation in the group of colleagues we work with!

This issue of Fontes Artis Musicae is dedicated to Public Libraries and each article here

deals in some way with the present situation in many Public Libraries in many countries.

First we look at the past in Mattias Lundberg's "The First Hundred Years of Music

Librarianship at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music: 1771-1871." The early history of

the present Music and Theatre Library of Sweden (the former Statens musikbibliotek) in

Stockholm shows us that, even in the 1800s, developments were taking place that are still

very familiar for us today. After the first 50 years, the rules for lending were 'modernized'

and so from 1850 onward, students and other interested people could be a member and

borrow music. This familiar process links the past to the present, where other demands are made and

we have to keep our physical collections safe and decide about new formats and digital

offerings by license. No country has found the real answer yet and no situation is really alike. Gilles Pier ret,

in his article "L'avenir de la musique dans les bibliothèques publiques françaises ou de la




Distribution code Plus-libraries maintaining-policy for sheet music according to genre or instru

mentation, Siso (Dewey) - code

Vocal 788.1 en .2 Arnhem Instrumental 789.2,789.4,789.92-.99 fm/vm Vocal 788.3, 788.4, .42, .46, .47, .6 Utrecht Instrumental 789.92-.99 am/pm Vocal 788.41 Rotterdam Instrumental 789.92-.99 bs/jm Vocal 788.5 - 788.9 Amsterdam Instrumental 789, 789.1-.19, 789.3, .7, .8 Vocal Middelburg Instrumental 789.13, 789.5, 789.6, 789.92-.99

Amsterdam

Vocal classical music (solo); all genres Part- and Choral music (opera, operetta, Liturgical -and

Christmas repertoire), partitures ~ piano scores

Keyboard instruments

Plugged instruments

Remaining, (in connection with general support function)

Arnhem Middelburg Folk music vocal/instrumental Organ

String instruments Brass wind intruments

Wood wind instruments Percussion

Ensemble/Orchestra classical

Rotterdam Utrecht

Jazz Vocal Songbooks

Jazz Ensemble/Orchestral Musicals

School orchestra Ensemble/Orchestra Popular genres

Symphonic and String orchestra (parts) Hafabra (parts + partitures)

TABLE 1 Distribution code for sheet music. Plus libraries music working group, (2005).3

difficulté à trouver un modèle de substitution à la discothèque de prêt", discusses the French dilemma: do we keep on offering a CD collection or do we start experimenting.

Francis Metcalfe from the UK touches on the loss of forming an actual audio collection, with libraries moving towards subscribing to aggregated audio products and user educa tion as a key role in "Issues of Access: The Future of Music Audio Provision in UK Public Libraries".

Laurel Tarulli addresses what can we achieve with the new cataloguing and the Web 2.0 developments, which can be a real major advance in the democratization of our exis tence as Public Library, in her article on "Exploring Public Library Music Collections

through Social Technologies". Siren Steen gives us an update on the present development of the Grieg collection in

the Public Library of Bergen, Norway. The older and larger public libraries usually have a one or more special collections. These collections sometimes have developed in a nat ural way, growing year by year. Other collections are purchased by the library. Some are

3. See http://www.plusbibliotheken.nl/index.php?cmd=fîle&action=download&file=88.




there, 'given in loan', to the library. The Grieg collection is a different case where this col lection of national importance which was donated to the Bergen Public Library by the

composer himself. Ria Warmerdam looks at the changes that occur in library work and how librarians

cope with the new demands, where not only new competences are needed but also, perhaps, even a new kind of librarian. She works with "Keeping the Music Alive" through various outreach programs in The Netherlands.

While these developments are emerging, we also look at various activities that are still

part of our daily work, like different school projects. These activities are part of our old and our new library policies. Ann Kunish in Norway and Verena Funtenberger in

Germany discuss their student education projects in "Boomwhackers: A Public Library Service for Music Teachers in the Public School System in Oslo, Norway" and "Von

Mozart-Rallye bis Notenkoffer: Musikspezifische Angebote der Stadtbibliothek Essen für

Schulen, Kinderchöre und Jugendensembles", giving us a new view on the possiblities of outreach education and of the changing relationship of library, education, and patrons.

In the IAML Public Libraries branch we have dedicated a special page in the IAML Toolbox Children's corner to keep track of special projects that can be of interest to the international community of music librarians.4 One of these projects is Why Mozart fell out of the clouds', discussed in Verena Funtenberger's article.

How wonderful it is to be able to join the IAML conferences and meet with colleagues from all over the world. You can share your experience with everyone and learn about the

many variations in music library work by visiting the libraries elsewhere. We are therefore

very happy to present articles about public libraries in Turkey and Japan. Where the first is

one that we know very little about at the moment, Japan is one of the oldest IAML groups. The first article is about "The History of Public Libraries in Turkey" by Bülent Yilmaz.

We learn about the structure and number of libraries in the country. Because of the way pub lic libraries are organized, there is very little attention for the library collections in general and there are very few libraries with a music collection. Turkish colleagues are very much

aware of that situation and there may be some positive development in the near future. The second article, on "Public and Special Libraries in Japan" gives us an insight into a

much different public library situation than in Turkey. There is no lack of music collec

tions; on the contrary, a great deal of the music in collections is donated by the general public and local collectors. The concern here is the staff is not being trained as music li

brarians and has difficulties with the special formats of printed music Since the librarians are having difficulties, the users have difficulties as well.

What is really important in our time is the greater need to make schoolchildren, stu

dents, and library users, as well as colleague librarians, more aware of the information

that we, as music librarians working in public libraries, have to offer. With the help of mar

keters, support of new techniques and the continuing efforts by local librarians, this may well be the essence of our daily work as public librarians, guiding people to find their way in the (digital) information society. My conclusion is that, if you look more closely at the

list of articles, there is only a thin line between Public Library in the past and in the pres

ent, and all that looks new, is just the reflection of the development of our Society. I like to thank all authors for their contributions and the inspiration it will give us all.

4. http://www.iaml.info/fr/activities/public_libraries/iaml_toolbox.



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