IAML International Association of Music Libraries

This year we were with 41 public librarians from 14 countries. That is 15% of the total of 284 IAML attendees, 10% of all attendees including colleagues from IAMIC and IMS.

The Public Libraries Branch presented itself with 7 speakers in 2 sessions, a working lunch was organized for the first time and we also had a last separate meeting for the IAML Toolbox. On Thursday afternoon we attended a tour in the public library of Göteborg together with 18 colleagues.

Our first sessions was attended by 70 colleagues, among them 29 ‘Friends of the Public Library’! The theme of this session was ‘Are you interactive?’, the interactive co-operation of the Public library with various partners.

The firstt session opened with a paper of 2 colleagues from our hosting country with the title “The X-files - Demos of local rock bands presented in the public library” by Margareta Hagman and Christina Wengström Gävle bibliotek.
They painted an interesting picture for us of the way the public library in Gävle, a town at the east-coast of Sweden, plays a role in the local music scene and works together on this with the local community since the 1960s. Maybe this could develop in a natural way because the library is housed in the Concert hall and thus can provide a recording service for young people in the environment, who can store their own music in the collection of the music department of the local library. This collection consists of LP’s and CD’s and is available to all users.

Recently the library has started a project in co-operation with the Municipal Archives in order to keep the collection available for the future and also to add local collections and knowledge to the National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images in Sweden.

Now that we are all looking for new ideas for our music library work, an interactive communication and exchange of information with our library users seems a natural and positive development.

During the discussion afterwards, the suggestion was made that you could easily store and provide a digital form of these private music sessions for the future users. The presentation was nice and had nice pictures from the Gävle environment.

The 2nd presentation “Are you interactive – Enhancing access to music” was given by Roberto Grisley (Academia Nazionale Santa Cecilia, Rome). He replaced his dutch colleague David Crombie (Dedicon, before FNB).

Many developments by European projects were at first initiated by the desire to make music more acceptable for people with a visual handicap, like brailed music and spoken music.
Now that the target group of possible users has widened, because of the technique is now available for us all, we can now all profit from the new technological developments and the available new content.

There have been several European projects on music that covered a range of topics like Harmonica (access to catalogues and archives), Cantate (music encoding issues) and Miracle (specific solutions for visually impaired people).

This presentation is about a new European project IMAESTRO!, an interactive digital music program that explores novel solutions for music education, in both theory and performance. This concerns a multimedia program, with a music-edit program Sibelius in order to enable users to make changes in the music.
IMAESTRO! will be easy to use and will, as interactive program be useful to the interaction between the teacher and student as well as for self instruction. That’s why it will be very interesting for public libraries too to see how the development of the definitive program will look like, in order to offer this as a new service to our active sheet music users. A first pilot is on the way!

Our 3rd speaker was Birgitta Sparre who talked about the Municipal Music School in Karlstad and Arvika, two small towns on a short distance from one another, in the north part of Sweden, where she is teaching guitar and also takes care of the school library.

What are the problems and successes that arise from a co-operation between the municipal music school and the public library? Since a number of years the school library is co-operating with the local public library, a rare thing in Sweden. Both parties feel this is a positive thing and it has resulted in a more efficient organization of library work in the Music school. Especially in the fields of acquisition, cataloguing and library administration progress was made and the organization is now more more efficient and professional. Although there is no real joint acquisition, colleagues communicate about there new titles and see that unnecessary ... are avoided. The role of the school library is of course limited and dependent of the music teaching program.

The circulation system/lending system of the public library is especially saving the teachers a lot of time and worry.
Eventually it seems that co-operations like these are also depending on the personal energy and commitment of the colleagues involved.

The theme of the 2nd session of our Branch was “Supporting Public libraries”. This morning was completely reserved for experiences in supplying digital services in the Netherlands and the 3 Nordic countries. Speakers: Michiel Laan (Netherlands: Digileen), Ann Kunish (Norway: LâtLân), Jonas Hallström (Sweden: Musiwebb), Ole Bisbjerg (Denmark: Netmusik).

During the last 4 years, libraries in these countries have started offering digital music collections to their patrons. This service are simply the traditional library service in a new digital form, yet they have challenged our perception of what we do and how we do it. Acquisition, cataloguing, presentation and of course circulation must all be approached in a new way, and we must relate to new partners in order to create and maintain the service. Denmark was the first to start the digital service in 2004, followed by Norway. More recently followed by Sweden and the Netherlands. Each country have chosen slightly different technical platforms, providers, repertoire and all have had their own experiences on negotiating with relevant rights organizations.

Questions were raised as to how these services are to be funded and who should pay? What would be the balance between the digital and the physical music collection and how does copyright and the national law play in?
Not all answers were given at the session in Göteborg, because in fact we are still in the middle of the process.

We can tell you that colleagues in Denmark have just had a tough time concerning funding of the project, with less funding the use of Netmusik will be more expencive. The colleagues from Norway will not be able to continue their service LâtLân because of lack of financial support.

Michiel Laan was the first speaker and the experiences of his company, CDR, look promising, but it is too early to speculate about the future prospects at this moment.
Still the first results show some difference between the use of the service in Denmark and the Netherlands. A possible result build on a relation between the offered repertoire and the age of the target group.
Until now the Digileen service is offered for free and the service started with only 5000 titles. Between November 1005 and June 2006 they had 240.000 downloads with that and that could make the others a little jealous.
The CDR also extends its new service with new repertoire, and also seeks new partners like recently a radio station.
The traditional group of library users between 26-45 years whom we lose as regular customers, get a special offer from the CDR with a special digi-try-out membership. One message was clearly given, the public libraries should not stop or reduce theirs budgets on music just like that, but instead of that make an effort and invest this into the new service.

The Swedes started their service in 2004 with digital offer of classical music with E-Classical, this service is now expanded and since 2006 they have started a co-operation with the Danish Phonofile. This offers the user, besides E-classical (collection 220.000 music titles, 15% classical- 85% popular titles) also 50% of the Top-10 offers of iTunes, Homedownloads and CDON. This results in 15.000 downloads and 215.000 visitors per day, among that many non-library members.
Of course this could be most interesting for our own organizations, with the new service we can attract new user groupes to the libraries!

It wil be interesting to follow the developments, the speakers had a lot to discuss with each other.

The co-operation of the Branch itself

The afternoon was divided in a working lunch and a Toolbox meeting, next year this will be one meeting for all activities undertaken in our Branch.

The Public Libraries Branch organised a first Working lunch this year.
We counted 30 colleagues and while having a bite, we had a short agenda with mainly one subject this time, the organization of our selves and 2 speakers.

1. Branch organization
   Since last year the 3 year life term of the ‘Working group for the IAML Toolbox’ had come to an end and so we, the Officers of the Branch have proposed the IAML Council a new way of co-operation for our Branch.
   The Council has agreed with our ideas to make the organization of the Branch as well as the Toolbox into a more integrated co-operation with the Officers being responsible for both the sessions during the conference as well as for the the IAML Toolbox.
   This means that we, as your chosen Officers, will be able to work together in a more active way with every member of the Branch and so develop our Branch, during the IAML conferences as well as during the year.
   Thus we will be more able to organize and develop the Branch on a more regular basis and communicate all on the Public libraries pages on the IAML website.
   This is important with working together on distance and also because we do not like to be too depending on colleagues attending the IAML conferences. Usually only 12% and we are with a lot more colleagues, we all have our own networks in our countries we can use.
2. Guest speakers at out table
   Not every Public Library is similar to the other and during the lunch we invited 2 of our colleagues to tell us about there daily work from a more personal point of view.
   Speakers were Anneke Lewis from the Kulturhuset in Stockholm and Corinne Brun, colleague from La Cité de la Musique in Paris and also Officer (secretary) for our Branch.
   It was a pity we could not use the internet in this room, but I feel that this direct way of exchanging experiences can, on a slightly more personal level, add to our understanding and give us new ideas.
3. We asked colleagues for input for the sessions in Sydney conference next year.

IAML Toolbox meeting

Active members were invited to take part in the meeting for the IAML Toolbox, the international Back 0ffice for the Branch. It was a little unfortunate that we had to move to another room, due to technical problems with the internet connection, because we lost some of our audience along the way.
Of course we have been dissapointed not being able to show our colleagues what the IAM Toolbox could look like.
So we started our meeting with a short presentation about the new IAML website, the Branch and how we would like to develope this.

Officers of every professional Branch of IAML will be able to edit and form their own pages and so I have been a guinea pig for the Public libraries pages myself, while receiving instructions from our webmaster Gabriele Gamba.

This is what has been discussed so far:

• We have asked for some adjustments, we would like to have pictures on the site and would like to present the ‘LOOK-a-LIKE -LIBRARY-LOCATOR' in such a way that colleagues can be interactive and add information to the project themselves.
• Christel Rosenburg (Sweden) is the Toolbox webmaster and she will work with the Officers during the years in order to make a start with the Toolbox pages.
• In order to make better use of the communication and information from the conference host land, we would like to co -operate with the Swedish colleagues during the year and pass this on, like an estafette, to the Australian colleagues after next years conference in Sydney.
  The idea is to present a ‘Round table’ with the Officers and colleagues from the host land, a virtual place for discussion.
• We concluded that we are not trying to copy the Danish Toolbox example, this is a website working on a national level, a central website which offers colleagues information on a daily basis about their daily work, like acquisition etc.

The IAML Toolbox is meant to exchange information and communication. For instance examples of best practices, sharing knowledge and experience, make colleagues aware of new developments.

New decisions

Toolbox 1: We will start a list of best-practice examples, the colleagues involved will be asked to describe their projects.

• On collections: - The Cecilia – project (United Kingdom), that presents and describes all music collections nationwide.
• On Children: - ’How Mozart fell out of the sky’. An educational project for children from Essen, Germany. Last year presented by Verena Funtenberger.
• On co-operation: - The Danish Toolbox as a good example of a very practical online co-operation and support from and for colleagues a national level.

Toolbox 2: The LOOK-a-LIKE-LIBRARY-LOCATOR project will need to be extended and ideas from colleagues will be added. Fifteen countries are involved in this first fase (Europe) of the project, which has, practically speaking not started yet. Eventually the purpose of this project will focus on exchanging knowledge and experiences about our library collections and Activities, in order to be able to work together more easily and exchange ideas with libraries that have a similar background.

Toolbox 3: We have certain ideas on for our webpages and we would like to integrate the IAML forum in to the Toolbox pages and prefer a more direct entry.

Toolbox 4: We like to start with an inventory of available digital and digitized collections of sheet music and present them in the IAML Toolbox.
It will also be interesting to investigate if it is possible to make digital sound archives, like Netmusik, LâtLân etc. available for our IAML colleagues.

Toolbox 5: A request was made to have information on copyright for Public Libraries available on the Toolbox pages. We will co-operate on this with the IAML Copyright Commission.

The next conference will be in Sydney, Australia. The Public Libraries Branch will be organizing two sessions and one joint session with the Branch for Libraries in Music Teaching Institutes. We will be looking for subjects and speakers in the region of South Asia and Australia/New Zealand.

For information about the Public Libraries Branch: http://www.iaml.info
Professional Branches: Public Libraries Branch including the IAML Toolbox !Under Construction!

Hanneke Kuiper (chair) Public Library Amsterdam