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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 47| October 2000
Addressing the needs of music
The National Library of Australia and the Australian Branch of the International Association of Music Libraries have set up a joint advisory committee to consider issues affecting access to music collections in Australia.
Our first agreed priority is Kinetica and music. Managing music collections is time and resource intensive. Like other non-book material, music poses particular problems for cataloguing and for searching. The specific cataloguing fields, problems of uniform titles, and often complex descriptive data on instrumentation, musical form of composition, performers, physical presentation or editions of the score or sound recording all complicate the process. This has inhibited the comprehensive loading of music records on the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) and led to variable quality of data. For the user, it is often difficult or complex to locate specific items and download records. In the most recent 1999 survey of the NBD by the Australian Library Collections Task Force, collections of music scores and sound recordings were shown to be the forms least represented in the national database.
Over the years, many institutionsacademic libraries, State and special libraries with music collectionshave had neither the resources nor sufficient numbers of trained staff to cope with often massive backlogs in their music cataloguing. Moreover, with the needs of their immediate users as a first priority, many libraries have had to implement short-term, institution specific solutions to provide access to their sound recording or sheet music collections and to their instrumental/vocal sets of scores and parts for musical performance. The ephemeral nature of music collections in print and sound and the expense of high quality scholarly editions have also mitigated against lending. Many collections necessarily have restricted access; others are not readily visible.
With these problems, the NBD has not been able to function as effectively as it should as the basis for resource sharing in music. The joint advisory committee therefore initially aims to advise Kinetica on strategies for improving the methodologies for music and for loading music data. Three guides are currently being written and will be evaluated by the advisory group before being distributed widely:
Cataloguing backlogs and gaps in the NBD data are being further identified, as well as a range of strategies for supporting better access through a consistent level of cataloguing. The National Library will maintain its own commitment to retrospective cataloguing of its print music collection (now approximately 75 per cent of individual items, and 100 per cent at a collection description level) onto the NBD through an ongoing priority plan. The National Librarys Coordination Support Branch is assisting through developing mechanisms to gather qualitative and quantitative data that will supplement that collected in the NLAs Survey of Music in Australian Libraries in 1995 and the Australian Library Collections Task Force Surveys of the NBD in 1999.
It is hoped through such initiatives to develop a comprehensive picture
of the state of the music collections in Australia and further some agreed
strategies for increased visibility and access to the collections, that
will support the long-term development of the nations music
infrastructure. For further information, ideas or feedback, please contact
the new Curator of Music at the National Library, Robyn Holmes
(rholmes@nla.gov.au) or the President of IAML (Australia), Georgina Binns
(georgina.binns@lib.monash.edu.au).
Robyn Holmes
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au