The RIdIM Database of Performing Arts in Visual Culture is poised to be a vital part of the global arts and humanities landscape. It is free to access at db.ridim.org, offering an ever-expanding variety of visual culture items (more than 3,000, and growing). Increasingly, image files from many museums and other institutions can be uploaded and viewed directly in the database, following emerging standards for public domain usage. The database supports text in any language and script, provides established lists of names and places, and includes an extensive international vocabulary of musical instruments, based on the multilingual thesaurus developed by the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO). This presentation highlights the growing and planned international coverage of the database, thanks to the recent cataloguing efforts of numerous individual participants and shared data from partner projects.  We invite new database content by welcoming individuals to catalogue works of personal interest and familiarity. RIdIM aims to include art works of all types, time periods and places, in the database, so that the possibilities for participation are vast. In addition to the database style guide, and support from the RIdIM Editorial Center staff, new tutorial materials are available in text and video formats to assist cataloguers in creating database entries.

The Ecstasies of Influence project at Matralab, a research center at Concordia University, explores whether creative strategies from various artistic domains can be transferred into music creation. For example, can music be composed the way a poet arranges words, or a visual artist conceives an installation? Teams of artist-researchers in Montreal, Berlin, and Pune (India) are engaging with artists from various disciplines to learn their creative processes and aesthetic strategies, to try and apply them to musical composition.

To document the process, video recordings are made of the discussions, workshops, rehearsals, and performances. However, how do we preserve these multimedia research materials for reuse throughout the project and in the future?

This paper discusses the process of determining the archival needs of
the project and users, and why MediaWiki was selected as the best platform for a searchable and browsable database. It also discusses how a taxonomy was established for an in-progress research project, and the challenges of managing information for an interdisciplinary and multi-national music research project.

In this presentation, we will discuss the role academic libraries can play in supporting digital musicology by providing examples of successful library initiatives to support digital humanities. We will then advocate for libraries who wish to play a greater role in supporting digital musicology scholarship to use scholarly primitives as a conceptual framework for gaining an in-depth understanding of the research practices of music scholars and hence develop facilities and services that will meet their needs. Coined by Unsworth in 2000, the term ‘scholarly primitives’ refers to the “basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.” By looking at these basic functions, it becomes easier to identify where libraries could help scholars overcome some of the barriers they face during the research process. The presentation will also include a review of the empirical literature on scholarly primitives of humanities scholars and on the scholarly behaviour of music and arts scholars. Based on this review, we will propose a list of scholarly primitives for musicologists grounded in empirical data.

After nearly two years of re-design and re-structuring, the new version of the RDA Toolkit, the international standard used by many music libraries for cataloguing, was released on 13 June 2018. This new version, while looking completely different from past versions of the Toolkit, implemented concepts from the IFLA Library Reference Model, the consolidation of the FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAD conceptual models. This paper will detail the many changes to the RDA Toolkit, the possible impact of the changes on music cataloguing practices, and the role that translations of the Toolkit will play in helping diverse international communities implement the new RDA Toolkit.

This session will discuss how music librarians can be actively involved in the process of scoping and designing digital audiovisual (AV) access systems or the AV components of larger digital access systems. It will outline how music librarians can be involved in the creation of requirements, often based on end user research, as well as the development prioritization process for these systems.

Reprints (using the term broadly to cover any photolithographic reproduction of an existing publication or document) are an often misunderstood form of publication, scorned by some scholars and publishers and praised by many who use them. Now, when reprints are being replaced by various digital forms of publication, is an opportune moment to review the reprint phenomenon, both to offer a history and to propose much-needed definitions.

During the twentieth century, reprints made important contributions to both music and the study of music. During and after World War II, reprints were essential to professionals and amateurs seeking editions of standard repertoire. With the post-war expansion of colleges and universities, reprints provided access to important scholarship and to what were then standard editions. And reprints provided the Early Music community with the possibility of playing Renaissance and Baroque works in the forms in which they were originally published.

This paper offers the views of someone who has been both a publisher whose catalogue contained several hundred reprints and a scholar who made use of reprints in his own research.

The music score publishing industry has maintained its traditional strongholds and print continues to dominate the market.  The notable developments in electronic music score (eScore) publishing have for the most part targeted individual end users and their personal needs, leaving out libraries whose mandate is to collect, disseminate, and preserve for future generations.  A few for-profit aggregators have produced packages of copyrighted eScores that are available to libraries for rent or purchase.  These packages, however, have not been curated by music librarians and lack an awareness of library users’ needs, so their long-term value is questionable.  Fear of widespread piracy, disconnect between music librarians and publishers, and the absence of sustainable acquisition models are the major factors delaying the emergence of eScore as a viable format in music library collections.

In this presentation, we will introduce an alternative model of acquisition that involves close collaborations between a publisher of Canadian art music, Plangere Editions (PE), and the University of Toronto Libraries.  Our end goal is to acquire, provide access for authorized users, and preserve the eScore version of PE’s publications, for which we have purchased print equivalents in the past.  Aside from the scope of the current project, the workflow that we are implementing to do this work is scalable and can be used for collaborations with other music publishers.  Furthermore, the workflow has inherent potential for collaborative collection development among music libraries in Ontario and beyond.  The project is the first of its kind in Canada. 

While the electronic publishing of books and scores has become commonplace, e-publishing of scores by major music publishers has lagged-behind. Libraries and music publishers are unwilling to relinquish the print format, but the proliferation of music notation software has given rise to greater numbers of self-publishing composers, keen to sell and deliver their musical works in PDF.

The Music Library at the University of Western Ontario is an anomaly, in that it acquires, catalogues, and circulates music for the Faculty of Music’s choirs and large ensembles. A faculty member’s request to participate in a large-scale commission of a new work for wind ensemble in 2011 was approved; when the work was completed, the score and parts arrived as PDFs contained in zip-files: we suddenly found ourselves in the printing business.

Since 2011, we have continued to acquire music in PDF for our choirs and ensembles, eventually developing a work-flow and suggestions for best practices for dealing with these materials.

The Sheet Music Consortium has been providing access to diverse collections since 2003. When it works, both bibliographic information and scans can be retrieved, but the searching access is not ideal for today’s users. Administered through UCLA, ingestion of new materials is not always easy for busy staff to manage. But their Digital Library Program has turned new attention to the Consortium, and change is in the wind. Join Andrea Cawelti for a presentation on new developments, some interpretive materials now available, and a look at what we can do with sheet music in 2018!

Although subscription music publications represent a small fraction of the overall music market in eighteenth-century Britain, scholars are increasingly using lists of subscribers to study the intersection of composers, audiences, and the music publishing industry. Detailed examination of subscription lists, for example, may be used to sharpen our knowledge of women’s involvement in the musical life of eighteenth-century Britain – as composers, consumers, performers, and publishers. The subscription method generally involved a buyer’s payment (or promise of payment) in advance of publication. In return, the subscriber was often rewarded with a discount on the retail price and her/his name inscribed in the work’s first edition on a list of subscribers. This paper provides results of a comprehensive study of subscription lists to over 450 music publications from eighteenth-century Britain. Data generated from these lists document the substantial influence and success of women in the music marketplace as the century progressed. Women accounted for a sizable share of subscribers to a wide range of music genres, and women composers often outpaced their male counterparts in subscription sales, especially with respect to songs (e.g., A.M. Hodges, E. Turner, F.E. Hodges) and keyboard music (e.g., M. Forrest, J.M. Guest, C.M. Barthélemon).

November 11, 2018 will mark the Centenary of the Armistice ending World War I. One of the iconic songs, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” by Zo Elliott and Stoddard King is still used to signify the music sung by soldiers in camp and in the trenches during the war. It turns up in a variety of films, television shows, and events commemorating the war. It was composed by two college students, and eventually published, yet were it not for the singing of some Canadian soldiers, it might not have become a cornerstone of the musical repertory of the military from the British Empire and the United States. There is another oddity concerning the song—it exists in two versions. The original, more familiar to British Tommies, has nearly been forgotten. And this has implications for the authenticity of the today’s performances. The presentation will draw on archival documentation from the Zo Elliott Papers at Yale University, contemporary accounts, and audio and video excerpts, both historical and contemporary. It is hoped that a Canadian audience may help to suggest resources for carrying this research forward.

This paper introduces the SongData Project, which harnesses the potential of discographic metadata to create new opportunities for popular music research. Adopting methods for Big Data research in the humanities (Moretti 2005), and influenced by the collaborative “Big Data History of Music” project (which includes scholars and librarians at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Library), this project develops approaches for the collection and organization of discographic and biographic metadata in order to explore the connections between music and broader socio-cultural and institutional frameworks over time. In this way, the project connects relevant data to reveal the connections and patterns that influence historical processes.

This paper outlines the work underway to develop a comprehensive dataset of country music singles from Billboard’s Hot Country Songs classification list (1944-2017). The project dataset has been enhanced with biographic information about the broader network of artists involved in the creative process in order to facilitate queries about the relationships between songwriters, performers, and producers involved in the creation of country music. After discussing some of the technical challenges of data curation, it demonstrates how analysis and visualization of this type of data can transform musicological understandings of genre.

In the age of the Internet, communication has advanced to unimaginable heights and modes of access to information have been revolutionized.  While the traditional core mandates of libraries – provision and maintenance of access to curated information – remain relevant, the very meanings of library and library services are under constant revision and scrutiny.  In this relatively unstable environment, music libraries have been navigating the change, at times along with the larger library community, and at others on their own given their somewhat unique nature.  Music has posed, and continue to bring forward, its own set of challenges encompassing a myriad of issues, but also future opportunities that require the omnipresent involvement and strong leadership of music librarians.  Therefore, the definition of music librarianship is also evolving to incorporate many more aspects that are increasingly part of the day-to-day life of a music librarian.

Considering all this change and the need for its successful navigation, an understanding of the larger directions of music librarianship seems highly valuable.  Every music librarian, regardless of their field of expertise, would benefit from the “larger picture” or a global view of the current issues and future directions in music librarianship.  The proposed panel, comprised of the leaders of the International and two national music library associations, aims to discuss a number of issues that music librarians encounter today and those in the horizon, for which they must prepare.

As part of Cornell University Library’s Fall 2017 survey about library services, spaces, and collections, undergraduate students were asked, “If you had a magic wand, how would you improve the library?” Inspired by responses from Music Library users, we identified several ways we could highlight resources and better help our patrons navigate the collection. This presentation will illustrate resulting improvements in signage, placement of stacks maps, promotion of special collections materials, streamed video resources, and on-demand tours, as well as ideas for programs to increase interaction with students. Where available, user statistics reflecting the changes will be included.

Local music provides evidence of community norms and insight into broader historical and cultural contexts. Collections of local music represent delimited geographic regions through documentary artifacts such as sound recordings, printed ephemera, historical and archival materials. Increasingly, cultural heritage institutions are preserving and collecting local music, although these practices are under documented in scholarly and professional literatures.

This presentation describes a SSHRC-funded research project, Sounds of Home: Exploring Local Music Collections and Collecting in Canada that aims to:
1) identify where collections of local music are held, what music(s) they document, and what evidentiary value they possess;
2) understand the perceived value of collecting local music, and
3) record local music collection management practices currently used by public institutions to determine areas where practices may be improved.

We will present the summary of a survey, which was distributed to local music collectors in Canadian libraries in 2018. The survey results provide an overview of current trends, challenges, and strategies faced by local music collection managers in Canadian libraries. We will also give a project update, including plans for next steps which include interviews with collection managers as well as an overview of local music collection in Canadian cultural heritage institutions.

An overview of the collections of the Bagaduce Music Lending Library (Maine), the Downtown Collection at New York University, and the Louis Delaquerrière Scrapbook at the University of Western Ontario.