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This year’s meeting of the Southeast Music Library Association was at the University of Georgia in Athens. Good weather, great shoptalk over lunch and dinner, and we had a good turnout this year, affording opportunities to re-connect with colleagues I hadn’t seen in a long time.

A couple of presentations that stood out for me:

DDA for scores. While the demand-driven-acquisitions model for books has been on the scene for a while, music librarians have been waiting impatiently for music vendors to offer the same for scores. A colleague from the University of Florida described a pilot project they did with Harrassowitz, involving an initial load of 2000 (print) books and scores, focusing on the subject areas of ethnomusicology, contemporary repertoire, and music education materials. Cataloging is being done in-house (brief records upon receipt, full cataloging when a title is bought). Both the UF folks and the vendor seem to consider the experiment sufficiently cost-effective to be counted a success, and Harrassowitz is said to be “very interested” in expanding the pilot to other clients.

Collaborative projects. In a presentation titled “Exposing Hidden Collections using Interdepartmental Collaboration,” a colleague from UNC-Chapel Hill described how she dealt with a backlog of uncataloged music journals in the Southern Folklife Collection by enlisting the aid of the serials catalogers in the main graduate library — who, in a now-familiar trend, were finding they had more time to devote to special projects thanks to the growth of e-resources.

Classification. The Library of Congress does not classify its videos, so there are no tables in its classification system designed specifically for this medium. This leaves open a wide range of options for a creative cataloger who does want to organize music videos using LCC: for instance, an opera or musical could go under the corresponding number for the score; or for the libretto/lyrics; or in the literature tables, under the literary work the opera/musical is based on; or under a special topic in drama (e.g., the musical Camelot under “Arthurian romances”); or under scripts or criticism of motion pictures. A fellow cataloger at Auburn presented a survey she conducted of libraries that were classifying music videos using LCC. Most class their opera videos under M1500, for opera scores; but many class films of musicals under PN1997, the number for motion pictures. In large part, such a choice depends on how one anticipates the work to be used locally.

Our meeting venue was a new, and very impressive, building for UGA’s Special Collections. We were given a tour, including their underground storage vault, similar to our offsite storage facility, but about three times larger. In addition to UGA’s materials, the vault currently houses artifacts from the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, which recently closed — its collections have come to UGA for safekeeping until a new home can be found.