The Current State of Music Librarianship and Implications for Musicology
Chair(s): Jonathan Sauceda (Eastman School of Music)
The horizon of possible musical investigation is fixed not only by the limits of the human imagination but by the tools that enable such research to enter into view. Musicology relies on access to materials that libraries preserve via happenstance or design, a dependence by no means unique among the arts, humanities, and science disciplines. The processes surrounding bibliographic instruction, technological development, and the acquisition of research materials have tremendous implications for what intellectual output can and cannot be produced and have undergone deep transformations since the millennium’s turn. This session builds on recent published work, including a special double issue that appeared in Notes vol. 80, 2023 titled “The Current State of Music Librarianship,” and the papers address how digital scholarship, information literacy, and collection strategies have informed the field of musicology and the disciplines of music more broadly.
Bibliographic instruction has shifted from a focus on rote memorization of an “authoritative” list of sources to a critical approach that challenges students to question those same sources and the motivations of their creators. Technology has undeniably affected the range of scholarly possibilities since the inventions of the codex, catalog, and compact disc, but developments have accelerated in recent decades, from the establishment of music open access journals to the ongoing mass digitization of public domain scores to rapid, bulk preservation of data at risk of cultural genocide. In spite of undeniable advancements, there are concerns about the prospects for the infrastructure of music research. Challenges persist in the collection, description, and discoverability of work by historically excluded voices. Freemium streaming media have revolutionized access to musical performances and obsolesced decades of library collecting, but serious questions about sustainability remain. Large (text and music) language models (so-called artificial intelligence) require informed engagement to address thorny legal and ethical issues even as they raise existential questions regarding the employment of those in knowledge fields. The following papers address these topics and more, such as the role of libraries in advancing the horizons of the field through developments in research pedagogy, the acquisition and preservation of born digital art, and data visualization.
Presentations of the Symposium
Digital Scholarship: A Present and Future for Musicology
Anna Kijas
Tufts University
During the past 10-15 years, the field of musicology has begun to explore the potential of digital scholarship (DS); for example, scholars are engaged in creating open-access digital editions of music, applying network visualizations to study musical relationships, and storytelling via electronic means. Digital scholarship is a broad umbrella term, like the digital humanities, and challenging to define mainly because it is multi-faceted depending on the community that interacts with it. One consistent aspect of DS is that most projects and services are connected to or supported by the library at one’s academic institution. As Michele Urberg has shown, another feature of this work is that it requires scholars, due to the breadth of necessary expertise, to collaborate with library or archives workers, as well as technologists on their campus.
In this talk, I will take a deeper dive into several aspects of digital scholarship that I have explored in earlier publications, specifically: what does DS look like in the discipline of musicology, and what implications might DS have for the future of music research? I will highlight a few projects developed by music scholars and explore common elements that lead to successful digital scholarship projects (such as those applying music encoding, machine learning and AI, the preservation of important cultural data at risk of eradication, and network visualization). In addition, drawing upon work in digital humanities pedagogy by myself and others, including Tim Duguid, Brandon Walsh, Chelcie Juliet Rowell, and Alix Keener, I will provide examples that illustrate how digital pedagogy can be incorporated in music courses to support the development of critical digital literacies in students who may become scholars, instructors, and/or librarians themselves.
Music Information Literacy’s Critical Turn
Z. Sylvia Yang1, Angela Pratesi2
1DePauw University, 2Bowling Green State University
The information landscape music scholars and students navigate has changed dramatically making information literacy a foundational skill for music inquiry, yet teaching has always required instructors to be judicious about the content and skills covered in the limited time available, making it challenging to prioritize information literacy instruction despite its importance. Like other academic disciplines, music librarianship and its specializations have an existing body of scholarship and praxis, including information literacy instruction and pedagogy. In recent years, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Music Library Association have adopted a more expansive definition and comprehensive understanding of information literacy to accommodate our larger and more complex information landscape, which as Pratesi and Yang have demonstrated, has “expanded radically and splintered in the last two decades.”
At one time, information literacy was as simple as “find, evaluate, use,” the definition commonly adopted in assessment rubrics and accreditation requirements for higher education. Today librarians understand information literacy to be, “the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning” (Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education), with six interconnected threshold concepts that include knowledge practices and learner dispositions. Building on recent scholarship on music research education, this presentation will explain where information literacy has been and is going. Disciplinary shifts demand that musicologists and music instruction librarians understand pedagogical practices such as scaffolding, assessment, and critical evaluation of technology, and that they reflect thoughtfully on the content they are teaching. Information-literate musicians require training to understand and engage with the various kinds of content and materials available for the contemplation, study, creation, and enjoyment of music.
W(h)ither Music Research Collections?
Kirstin Johnson
University of Illinois
Academic libraries have at the heart of their missions the provision of access to the materials that students, scholars, and educators need. Archival institutions have a closely related duty to preserve creative and scholarly output for future generations of researchers and learners. What then are libraries to do when recorded sound and notated music are increasingly distributed via streaming, self-publishing, or digital delivery of files directly to the individual consumer? This situation has created interrelated issues for libraries and their patrons that I will explore in this paper.
First, discovery of new works in this environment becomes even more difficult for librarians selecting materials. We cannot rely only on trusted publisher and vendor catalogs and often lack the administrative flexibility to source materials from any/everywhere. While this might seem solely a logistical problem, needing only additional resources on the part of libraries, in fact it presents a larger issue. Libraries are actively working to diversify their collections alongside similar work being performed by music curriculum committees. The more materials by historically excluded voices on library shelves, the easier it is for performers and teachers to feature those materials on the stage and in the classroom. However, there are indications that an ever-increasing portion of self-published materials are by composers from historically excluded groups.
Second, logistical and legal hurdles arise when considering digital content acquisition and delivery. Exclusive end-user license agreements for score PDFs may preclude their addition to library collections. Even in cases where this is permissible, there then comes the added cost and labor to print and bind or electronically serve the files so that they may be cataloged, discovered, and accessed by patrons. In the case of audio and video, more content is available on streaming platforms that libraries cannot acquire on behalf of our patrons or preserve long term. Indeed, patrons increasingly want access to digital rather than physical content. Faced with these challenges, libraries are exploring ways to continue to fill their missions and meet patrons’ needs.
|
