IAML International Association of Music Libraries

The programme for the 2007 Conference in Sydney included the following papers:

• ANSCR : Exploring an Expansion for the ABC.
  Speaker: Lynne Carmichael (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
• Cutting and pasting parts: orchestral performance practice revealed in a conservatory's historic collections.
  Speaker: Angela Escott (Royal College of Music, London).
• Butterflies in amber: online data structure design and digitization of the Contemporary Chinese Orchestral Collection at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
  Speakers: Ching Lan Jasmine Koo (The University of Hong Kong), Sze Man Constance Yeung (The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts), and Peter Warning (The University of Hong Kong).

Working session (members only): No library is an island. How MOLA helps in the job as orchestra librarian Mable Wong (New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Wellington Newsround)

Report

Our working session gave the opportunity for a useful discussion of conditions for lending and hiring to borrowers outside our institutions. We talked about charges, restricted collections, and arrangers' rights. The  Hilversum Broadcasting Library of the Netherlands (MCO- Hilversum) lends out vocal scores for works that are difficult to obtain elsewhere. Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Köln does not hire out arrangements, while MCO- Hilversum does sometimes under very strict conditions like permission from the arranger and other rightholders. 

We welcomed the orchestral librarian of the Sydney Conservatorium, Ludwig Sugiri, who spoke about aspects of  his work, including hiring of music and systems for issuing orchestral parts to students.
Three papers were given in our open session, entitled ‘Alpha Butterflies’. Lynne Carmichael described the expansion of a classification system for recordings. The Alpha-Numeric System for Classification of Recordings (ANSCR), first published in 1969, has been updated, expanded, and modified to make it more suitable for Australian libraries. Angela Escott gave a presentation about the historic orchestral collections in the Royal College of Music (London) library, and spoke of what these collections tell us about performance practice from the eighteenth century to the mid twentieth century. Finally Ching Lan Jasmine Koo from the University of Hong Kong and Sze Man Constance Yeung from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts described a project to digitize, catalogue, and make available online a collection of scores and parts of  music by contemporary Chinese composers. The project is using Western music cataloguing systems with an adapted classification for the Chinese instruments.