This year’s meeting of the Music Library Association was held in Cincinnati, with a hybrid format. I attended virtually.

IL

A panel unveiled the Music Companion to the Framework for Information Literacy, the culmination of several years’ work developing music applications for the ACRL standard. Some points distinctive to music and other performing arts:

Embodied knowledge as a source of information. Performers and teachers as artistic authorities, reflecting and transmitting different traditions and schools of performance; performance venues (juries, recitals, festivals, competitions) that identify emerging artists; physical aspects of performance technique and practice as a source of information; the iterative nature of practicing and rehearsal, analogous to the research process.

Information has value. This is most clearly reflected in copyright and licensing of performances and recordings, but also in permissions needed for such activities as sampling, setting a text to music, etc.

Selecting sources that fit the need at hand. Like scholarly literature, music scores come in critical editions, pocket study editions, performance editions, etc.

Recognition of under-represented practitioners and communities, and barriers to participation in the performing arts.

UX

Colleagues at Indiana University presented the final results of a 2021 study of barriers encountered by music students when searching the library catalog. Staff who have worked with both music students and the general student population identified behaviors that seem to be distinctive to music students: gratifyingly, they spontaneously choose the library catalog first for their search; they make prompt use of facets to find formats (scores, recordings) that they need; they have facility with foreign languages, and make extensive use of their music-history knowledge to navigate search strategies and results. At the same time, they, like other students, have difficulties interpreting bibliographic records (for instance, distinguishing a study score from one that includes the performing parts); mistaking a cover image for a link to the e-book; and entanglements with language facets that don’t work as expected (often due to encodings for polyglot materials, e.g., CDs with liner notes translated into several different languages, films with subtitles, or edited volumes with contributions in different languages). While some librarians have argued for simplified displays to avoid “noise” for users, counterarguments  have been made that performing-arts users actually need more detail, more effectively mapped and displayed, to identify the performance-related materials they need.

AI in cataloging

This year’s conference offered expanded opportunities for catalogers to talk shop, and some very good discussions ensued. In one session, the topic of AI applications was touched upon. While assistance in metadata editing — scanning of title pages and tables of contents, generation or population of fields, OCR, text to talk, etc. — was a welcome prospect, there were other aspects of music materials that could be more problematic. Unlike books, which have long-established conventions for title-page layout, music scores often have title pages that are too stylized or artistic, or no title page at all (catalogers take title info from the caption or elsewhere in these cases) — can AI be trusted to make good decisions on the principle source of information? Music materials often contain multiple languages (the sung text; program notes and librettos in multiple translations, etc.) and algorithms like language of title page would not meet performers’ needs. There is also the question of music that is itself generated by AI — would the system or software be considered a contributor?

Public services

In a session titled “De-mystifying cataloging for public service librarians and staff,” panelists described their informal interactions with public-facing colleagues that proved to be to the mutual benefit of both. Some points that were emphasized: the multiple physical formats for music (scores, recordings, video); the use of uniform (formatted) titles (see the 240 field in Primo’s “Source record” view) to distinguish generically-titled works by opus number, musical key, etc.; finding shorter works in collections (keyword searching to pick up titles in contents listings); and the vagaries of the LC classification schedule (unlike the Ps for literary works, where an author’s works are generally shelved together, the Ns for art and Ms for music are arranged by medium — piano, orchestra, vocal, etc. — so a specific creator’s works may be scattered). Of course, anybody in ZSR can feel free to snag me for clarification of anything music-related you may encounter in our catalog — or see this Libguide I created for a similar purpose.