IAML International Association of Music Libraries

The U.S. Branch convened in February in San Francisco for its 1993 annual meeting, which was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Music Library Association (MLA). The board met earlier the same week and again during the IAML annual conference in Helsinki.

The branch has extended an invitation to IAML to meet in the San Francisco Bay Area within the next few years; the year will be dependent upon the schedule of other sites.

1993 was an important year for IAML(UK). While celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the branch it has also been a year of exciting developments and achievements; most notably, the publication of the Music Library & Information Plan Written Statement (Music LIP). The branch also established firm links with music librarians in Ireland and furthered good working relationships with the Department of National Heritage, the Library & Information Co-operation Council (LINC), the Library Association, and the British Library.

An in-depth study of the general music collections of the National Library of New Zealand - and the services based on them - was undertaken in 1993, and the results presented to the Management Committee. After careful consideration, the Management Committee has noted the considerable scope, depth, and comparative national and international strength of all components of the collection.

This time at least a few hundred of you already know what the Finnish Branch was doing during the year 1993! Organizing the annual meeting of IAML and the joint meeting of IAML, IASA, and IAMIC was, indeed, the whole year's focus, but instead of telling you colourful stories about that, I simply present the cold facts of 1993.

On March 26 and 27, 1993, representatives of different institutions representing the musical patrimony of Spain met at the Palacio de Magalia in Las Navas del Marqués (Avila) to organize a Spanish branch of IAML as had been planned at a previous meeting in Trujillo (Caceres) a few months earlier. The new branch took the name Asociación Española de Documentación Musical-AEDOM.

The Annual Meeting of the Swiss Branch took place in Bern at the National Library on May 7. The topic of the day was: “Music documentation in Switzerland: which offer for which demand?”. Papers were read about the role of music in the current reorganization of the National Library, the music information available from SUISA and the SVISA Foundation, and about music information in the Netherlands.

The 1993 season in Denmark was, of course, dominated by preparations for the forthcoming 1995 IAML congress in Elsinore. A group of eleven national members attended the Helsinki congress in order to listen and learn, to find praise and protest (very little to protest, indeed).