Wrap-Up

Today I will complete the final step of my internship: presenting on the topic and turning in this blog, along with abstracts of the chapters of the book I read.  The ending of this internship is a tad bittersweet, as I am still reeling from all I have learned and absorbed over the past few months on this topic.

I am going to use this last post to impress upon my readership how glad I am that an internship is part of my Music Librarianship curriculum.  While I am employed by the Archives of Traditional Music, getting to work in another campus music library has given me a greater range of experience that I feel will really translate to my future profession (provided I can find a job, which is my next great venture).  Also, getting to work so closely with a professional in my field has been valuable, as he has been able to answer a lot of my burning questions about what happens after school, and how to best market myself and my newfound skillsets.

So thank you SLIS, and thank you Music Librarianship specialization for forcing my credit choosing decision in this fashion.  I look forward to my next internship at Interlochen Center for the Arts Summer Camp, where I'll be working in the Fennell Music Library as their Music Reference Intern during the Summer II session.

Conclusions

Today I have my final meeting with my internship adviser.  It's almost a little bittersweet.  I am turning in the final version of my project (of which I am very confident of the Collected Works sheet, and slightly less thrilled with my Monuments work), as well as discussing the ups and downs of Acquisitions and Collection Development for a Music Library.

I truly think that this job is a lot more complicated than I ever anticipated it to be.  Collection Development sounds like an exciting responsibility for a Librarian.  I mean, what higher level of control can you exert than picking out what gets to be part of the overall collection?  But there is /so/ much that goes into that that it is almost overwhelming; at least for me.

I feel like taking the class S502 (Collection Development) con-currently with my internship was really a benefit, rather than a detriment, as perhaps assumed by other staff members at the beginning of this venture.  By doing both at once, I was able to relate lessons learned in the classroom to issues in my internship work and vice versa, which I think only enhanced my education on the subject overall.

I would definitely recommend this internship to any other Music Librarianship specializations, if only because the future of Music Librarianship is looking like a good deal of hybrid librarianship (or taking on more than simply one area of responsibility: i.e. just cataloging or reference) and chances are, we will be making some Collection Development decisions in the future.  If one hasn't experienced this, it could be (and probably still will be for me) rather daunting for a new professional.

Project Frustrations

After turning in the rough draft of my entire internship project, I'm feeling a little disheartened.  I spent countless hours on that thing (well, not countless, since I had to actually count them for my internship) and there are still issues.  Today, my adviser and I went over a few of the searching mistakes I had made (or rather, showed me tricks of how to get around odd Workflows quirks) and I am to re-examine some of the records for which I had previously thought we were missing volumes.

Even though it seems tedious, I feel like I am learning a lot from this project.  I have become close and personal with the M2s and M3s, which is such a small part of what the actual library is.  I'm not sure that I'd want to be a collection developer for such a large facility, as I have  no idea how my adviser manages to keep on top of all the incoming lists and acquisitions whilst attempting other projects like the one I am working on.  It seems a rather overwhelming to even contemplate.

Time for Round 2!

Standing Orders

Thanks to my Collected Works and Monuments projects I have a new respect for anyone who manages Standing Orders.  You would think that this would be an easy task: you order something like a series, and whenever a new one comes out -- you get it, right?  Sometimes.

I am discovering slowly yet surely that some of our standing orders are not being filled, whether due to the company itself stopping the production of the series (or the publisher going out of business) or due to just a very slow updating process. 

For my project, I have been checking our holdings against our very well organized and documented spreadsheet of standing orders, which is IMMENSE.  We had quite a lot of orders for both collected works and monuments, as well as other series which comes incrementally.  The spreadsheet also keeps track of complete orders (when we have all of the volumes) and orders which have been cancelled or stopped production.  This is not an easy task, if only because the vendors and publishers generally don't keep their online catalogs up to date.

So again, I am incredibly grateful to have this resource at my disposal, even if it blows my mind as to how vast and intricate the whole process is.

EBooks?

E-Books and the Music Library at IU are kind of at an interesting cross-roads.  At present, we generally don't order that many, unless they are specifically requested by a patron.  Why?  Because generally, you cannot make a quick copy and mark up an E-Book score, and generally that's what our patrons use the library to accomplish.

This, however, is not the trend in all music libraries.  When visiting Butler University, Sheri Stormes, the Performing Arts Librarian, explained, when asked, that she does tend to order books in E-Book format if they are available, simply because that seems to be the format that most Butler students are now utilizing in their research and in the classroom.  I should have asked her specifically about scores, but we were a tad short on time.

In this current internship, I have yet to firm order an E-Book, and am a tad curious as to how that would differ from firm ordering any other monographic title.  Would it immediately be added to the OPAC and usable?  (Obviously this would be a major plus if we did start purchasing E-Books.)  What would the MARC records look like? (That's the cataloger in me.)

For music research, I'll admit that I find physical books and scores more appealing if only because I can interact with the object to a greater extent than I could with my Kindle screen (although, I love my Kindle dearly).  But I am interested to see that if in the next five years or so another Acquisitions and Collection Development Intern will spend his/her time beefing up our E-Book collections.

Class Cross-Over

Today, for my Music Librarianship class, we visited the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Library (a completely different setting than a normal music library) and the Library at Butler University.  From what I learned, I can apply it to my internship in saying that there are /many/ different ways to develop a music collection, and many different strategies depending on the academic institution or organization for which one is working.

Our first stop along the tour was at the ISO Library, which is run by three enterprising Orchestra Librarians.  They, unfortunately, do not get to do much of their own collection development, as generally the seasons and other performance decisions are made elsewhere.  But they are the curators of their collection, and oversee its every detail, which seems much more hands-on than what we do at the Music Library.

As for Butler University, they are obviously a much smaller school at about 2100 students (very similar to my undergrad).  Their music library is not so much of a library as it is a collection housed within their main campus library, but it is still overseen by an enterprising Performing Arts Librarian which a heavy music background.  The campus, and size of the library, are much more admittedly my speed, and I hope to end up in an institution very similar to Butler once I graduate in August.

Fighting with the OPAC

Okay.  So you've heard IUCat is bad, right?

... c'mon.

If you haven't, then you've been leading a sheltered life of only keyword searches.

Well, IUCat and I have been fighting.

Because of recent events in my life, including the untimely death of my uncle in a motorcycle accident last week, I've been doing more of my internship project from the comfort of my room -- which means I don't have access to Workflows.  This /should/ be okay.  But it isn't.

The more work I do, the more I'm discovering that our OPAC just isn't cutting it, and this is for a /basic/ comparison project of items I know /should/ be in the catalog.  I know when I can't find /any/ volumes of a series that I'm in trouble.  I've tried Advanced Search, and some fancy boolean tricks to attempt to fish out the information, and while it manages to work about 65% of the time... that's just not good enough.

Maybe once we get the Blacklight search feature installed, it will be better.

... maybe?

... I can hope?

Monuments Project

Having at least completed my Collected Works project in rough draft form, I've been told to move onto another list on Harrassowitz's online catalog:  Monuments of Music from Europe.  Initially, I was pleased to note that this list is substantially shorter than the previous project  -- but don't worry, this seems even harder after delving into the first round of checks.

Instead of having every volume written by the same author (or attributed to one composer) all of the monuments have each volume attributed to a DIFFERENT author.  This means that if a monograph is not cataloged with a series title, I literally have to go down the list one by one and check every individual title.  And if you thought the Collected Works had a lot of volumes.. these monuments (the name says it all) are even worse (ranging from 100-200 volumes per collection).

This is going.. to take awhile.

Collected Works Update

The Collected Works Project that I have been working on is actually taking a good deal longer to accomplish than I had initially anticipated.  Not only is it tedious, but I am really starting to encounter issues with the OPAC which I had previously been able to work around.  For example, if I search for an item in the OPAC, and it is not given a series title, it will not show up in search results.  While this might make sense to the casual user, I find it endlessly frustrating, in that I have to double and triple check by doing multiple searches for items before I mark them as not held by the library.

And even then I am sure I am missing some.

Doing this is Workflows is substantially easier, if only because I can easily view Call Number holdings, but Workflows also has its idiosyncrasies, combined with its lag which makes the process take, arguably, just as long.  You would think in a digital age we would have perfected this to some kind of level.  Ah well, I'm certainly learning a lot about how cataloging practices can possibly affect collection development.  If I can't /FIND/ the item, I may accidentally purchase a second one -- which does not bode well for the library budget.

Collection Developers Meeting

Today I had the privilege of attending an IU Libraries Collection Developer's meeting.  Because of the time of the year, the primary concern was budgets, as each library needs to be sure to /spend/ their budget, but not /overspend/.  Discussion on how to do this occurred, and it was interesting to hear the different strategies of the different departments, especially in regards to materials.  Departments were told if they wanted to make any "big ticket item" purchases that now was the time.

The next big topic was DDA (or Demand Driven Acquisitions).  From the pilot project of this, for which was a $40,000 budget, $5,000 was spent.  This is going to be discussed at the next CIC (consortium) meeting.

There was a report on the Provost Forum, from which they have had a few meetings with individual libraries and their respective departments.  The topic of the relationships there will be continued with faculty involvement.  The future of academic libraries was also discussed, and hopefully we can continue to understand and work together with the departments to remain relevant and pertinent.

They also discussed using the ALF (Auxillery Library Facility) as a shared print repository for the CIC, and how they are hammering out procedures and policies.  It will just be journals at this time.  The collections workgroup recommended first set of deposits be such, and that they change the WorldCat locations to CIC Shared Repository.  It will consist of 250,000 volumes when complete.  IU will house half of this.

Theodore Front

Along with Harrassowitz, Theodore Front Musical Literature is probably the biggest vendor for music materials that the library uses to procure both text and sound recordings.  They were the first company to introduce approval plans for sound recordings in the 1970s for the Library of Congress (according to their brochure) and now, over 40 years later, our music library has a similar approval plan with them.

Theodore Front recently bought Arkiv Music, which I'll talk about at a later date, but they are our primary vendor for sound recordings and video.  Because we have an approval plan with them, the library receives a 10% discount off the manufacturer's suggested list price.

Their website, from which I am often ordering now, is fairly easy to use, save that sometimes the same number is assigned to multiple sound recordings -- but thankfully I am well aware from the get-go which disc it is that I am actually out to purchase.

ArkivMusic

This week I added another vendor to my list.  Arkiv Music (pronounced ar-KEEV in case you were curious.)  Arkiv Music is a vendor that sells music CDs and DVDs, as opposed to scores and other monographic items.  It is from this vendor that the music library keeps up to date on its Opera DVD collection, as well as its more contemporary music recorded sound.

Their site, while a bit cluttered, is easily navigated, which makes ordering a very simple process for me as an intern.  Also, CDs and DVDs are much more reasonably priced than monographs, and I am glad (if nothing else) that I do not have to convert Euros to US dollars to complete these transactions.

Music Library Association National Conference, Dallas, TX

Let me preface this internship blog post by saying that I think that attending a conference like the Music Library Association's national conference greatly added to the quality of my internship.  It is one thing to work with Acquisitions and Collection Development in the library, but it is a whole other arena to discuss it with many librarians, vendors, and publishers who are just as interested and intrigued by it all as you are.  Not only was I able to greatly enhance my own interactions with these people, but I was able to learn about the innovations and efforts taken by members of my own academic community to further these areas.  This post will outline my experience at MLA with the framework of this internship in mind: because obviously I learned a great deal more about music librarianship there than what simply focused on these two areas.

Thankfully, MLA is a much more welcoming conference for students than the other professional association conferences I have attended in my academic career.  I felt that I was valued as a scholar, and seen as the inevitable future of the profession, for which I am both humbled and excited.  But it was my interactions with vendors which put me in my place a bit.

Coming into the conference, I was very interested to get to speak with the vendors that I'd been dropping loads of cash into for the past month or so.  They were more interested in giving me a free pen than talking to me.  Now, do not get me wrong, I am a fan of free pens, but I had hoped to gain insight into their product.  It seems that because I am not an actual librarian, with a library budget at my disposal, that I was not worth their time as much as other attendees.  This is understandable, of course, from a business sense, and I do not think ill of them for this as much as I was a bit disheartened.

Otherwise, I was able to speak with other IU Music Librarianship alums, and feel that my future is bright, and I have made the right decision by attending this school if only judging from their prominent career paths. 

Harrassowitz and RIPM

In  my involvement with this internship, I have become, obviously, quite familiar with the vendor Harrassowitz (discussed in an earlier blog entry).  They are, as it would have, our major vendor for European scores at the IU Music Library.  Music, however, only makes up 3% of the company's holdings, which kind of blows my mind as a student who has had to pour through pages and pages of simply their Collected Works, as well as order from their main catalog.  

A few weeks ago, Harrassowitz officially announced its partnership with RIPM, or the Retrospective Index of Music Periodicals, and will now be offering it through the platform of RIPMPlus.  Not only will this make maintaining one's subscription to RIPM more easily managed, but Harrassowitz plans to add some upgrades to the RIPM platform, making it much more accessible to its users. 

Both the RIPM Index and the RIPM Archive are updated twice a year with new titles, and both are accessed on the RIPMPlus platform. Among the unique features of RIPMPlus are:

• a translation module that translates entries in the RIPM Retrospective Index from RIPM’s 14 languages to any of 52 user-selected languages
• easy selection of periodicals from a single drop-down window
• cross-language “search expanders” that retrieve all forms of names and terms.
• drop-down virtual keyboards for searching in non-Roman characters (e.g. Russian)

A demonstration of this, along with its unveiling will occur at the Music Library Association's national meeting in Dallas, February 16-19th.  I will be attending, so this is one of the many vendor booths I intend on visiting to better understand both the process of vendor-library relations, as well as new vendor initiatives to make themselves more marketable to their customer base (aka: Collection Developers).

Collected Works Project

For my big project of the semester, I am working on cross examining the Music Library's collection of Composers' Collected Works published by Harrassowitz.  Collected Works are compilations of all of the output of a certain composer, and are often multi-volume sets.  These sets are usually released one volume at a time, and are maintained via Standing Order with the company -- meaning that they will automatically bill us and send us the next volume as it becomes available.

My job in all of this is to check the catalog which Harrassowitz keeps password-protected on its site with both a spreadsheet containing all of our current and completed Standing Orders as well as our current collection in WorkFlows to make sure that our holdings are up to date.  While this can be slightly tedious at times (do you know many volumes there are of the Haydn Ausgabe??  124.)  Collected Works are one of the most used items in the Music Library, and thus it is very important to make sure that the volumes we possess are up to date, and if we do NOT have a Standing Order for a set, that we have Firm Ordered all that are available.

Not only has this project been an eye opener for me because of the lack of updating that happens to the Publisher's catalog (we have a few volumes that aren't even LISTED on the site) but it has made me aware of more obscure composers and their styles of work.  Thus, my musicology muscle is being worked along with my Collections Development organ.

On top of this project, I started working with an Eastern European vendor this past week named East View Information Services.

They sent us a spreadsheet of available titles in Eastern European scores and monographs.  I spent most of this past week working with OCLC and Workflows to determine our own holdings of the scores they listed.  This was a tad problematic (and time consuming) if only because the ISBN numbers provided on said list often yielded either other titles unrelated to the score, or no title at all.  While this is not that big of a deal, it certainly lengthened my search times for each title.  The only other issue I encountered was that often the titles had been translated from, say, Russian script to an Anglocized alphabet, meaning they had perhaps been cataloged under another form of that name.  Two hundred and fourteen titles later, I was able to come up with a cohesive list for us to order and strengthen our Eastern European classical music holdings.

The list itself also contains monographs (over 700 of them), but I am currently waiting on my Internship adviser to decide whether or not these are worth our time, since a vast majority of them are in Russian or other Eastern European languages, and thus would not be the most accessible items if added to our collections.

Budgets and Projects

Today, my internship meeting was all about how we make Acquisitions through one of our main vendors, Harrassowitz, through the use of several key programs: ReMARC, OCLC Connexion, and Workflows.  The Music Library uses Harrassowitz as its main vendor for European monographs and scores, and thus purchases a great deal of traditional "classical" music literature from them.

My internship coordinator gave me a stack of Bibliographic records (referred to by me as "bib records" from here on out) to seek out and determine whether or not we were already in possession of an earlier edition or version of the score in question.  For all but one, we did not already have the title.  Thus, I used Workflows to begin the ordering process: by importing the bib record from OCLC using ReMARC (a kind of snapshot program for bib records).  I import the record using the SmartPort command in Workflows, and from there I am able to process my order.  After I create an order number, I use Harrassowitz's website here to actually firm order the item.  This way, it goes through both their system and ours to purchase the title.

Once the item is shipped, it will go first to Wells Library (the main campus Library) to be quickly processed and then sent to the Music Library for cataloging.  At first, I was a tad confused as to why this happens, instead of all orders being shipped directly to us -- but it was explained that if books need further care, like binding or whatnot, it is much easier to send them with an order of Wells books.  It still seems like a bit of an unnecessary step to me, but it works, and who am I to argue with a system that isn't broken?

Order books also brings up an interesting point: the budget.  This is an important time in the fiscal year, since we're beginning to get a little short on funds.  We need to over-spend, rather than under-spend, because a great deal of our orders may not come in before the end of the fiscal year and we need to have spent all of our money to get MORE money the next year.  At present, we have about 35% of our budget remaining, which means the semester long project I am working on: both my desiderata list and my Collected Works projects (which I'm sure I'll post about soon) will have a place within the remaining funds

Yankee Book Peddlers

As part of my internship opportunities I had the opportunity to attend a meeting for Collection Developers from the Indiana University's many Libraries with Yankee Book Peddlers (YBP).  YBP is one of the many vendors that the University Libraries have agreements with, and the Music Library is no different.  We primarily receive monographs, rather than scores, from YBP, and have a rather lengthy (15 page) approval plan with them.  This morning, the meeting was run by Collection Development Manager Suzanne Kapusta and Director of U.S. Sales, Mike Walmsley.

The focus of the meeting was the changes being made to Gobi, the Yankee Book Peddler ordering website, where the librarians and acquisitions staff are able to view the books being automatically ordered as per their approval plans, the books recommended to the libraries on "slips", and are able to firm order titles.  The website is getting a virtual facelift, being launched in June 2012.  The new interface will be more aesthetically pleasing and contain a great deal more graphical elements.  The "slips" for the books will now contain book jacket scans, and all of the action buttons will be replaced by graphics; for example save will become a floppy disk, email becomes an envelope, and so on.  

Perhaps the most important feature that is being changed, however, is the search feature.  The current search methods are "Quick Search," which appears on the main page and is a general keyword search of title and summary fields, and "Standard Search" which must be chosen, and has a great deal more options for paring down the search.  The new interface will involve faceted searching, meaning that on the main page, the user can select from a drop-down menu the type of search they wish to perform -- allowing the user to narrow their search without taking the additional steps to reach the "Standard Search" page.  The user will be able to choose from a Subject search, which searches the Library of Congress Subject Headings as well as Interdisciplinary subjects, an Author/Editor search, a Keyword search which will now be able to search all of the fields of an entry, so that the Table of Contents and other notes are accessible by the search (and to note: the Keyword search will now also be able to use Boolean terms), a Title search, and an ISBN number search.  Once a search is performed, the new left sidebar will have categories in which a user will be able to par down the search.  For example, it will be much like Amazon.com, where if one would say, search for "Neil Gaiman" it would list "Movies & TV (43)" and "Books (1,973)".  If one of these categories is selected, the top of each page will list the user's "breadcrumbs" or how they have pared down the search results.

The last changes the YBP representatives discussed were changes to DDA or Demand Driven Acquisitions.  These changes are uniquely related to E-Book purchasing through EBL and Ebrary, which are two areas the Music Library does not really fully embrace as of yet.  Thus, this update was not as important to our collection development.

The presentation itself was informal, and many of the IU Librarians asked questions intermittently, making suggestions to further enhance the new interface (such as allowing narrowing by edition) and the ability to highlight certain fields when going over a slip list.  All of these suggestions were met with honest and interested responses by Suzanne and Mike, which made the dialogue that much easier.

After the formal presentation was over, after about an hour, myself and my Internship Adviser had a private meeting with the representatives.  In this meeting, we confirmed the meaning of some of the language used in the Music Library's approval plan as well as addressed a glitch in the "slips" system, since at the end of every "slip" list, we were being recommended books on Art, not music.  This was easily noted and hopefully fixed.  We also gained the ability to see of our fund's invoices on Gobi, which will make finding out what was shipped when much easier for us -- since all of our new acquisitions go to Wells Library first for processing.

Overall, the experience was very enlightening for me as a student.  Seeing the relationship between vendor and Library firsthand was eye-opening, and I was able to learn quite a bit more about one of the vendors which I will be firm ordering from this semester.

Introduction

It is the start of Spring semester here at Indiana University, Bloomington, which means, I, Sarah, am beginning my first internship experience in the realm of Music Libraries.  This blog will be dedicated solely to that experience, and contain both observations, thought provoking challenges, and article annotations.  I will also, lovingly, use this blog to keep track of my hour count - as apparently this is left up to me to handle.  (And knowing me, if I don't write it down, I'll forget.)

So I thought first I'd start out with a brief introduction.  My name is Sarah Elizabeth.  I am twenty-four going on twenty-five on April's Friday the 13th, and I am originally from a very small town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  This is my second semester here at Indiana University, and while I'm slightly sad that winter seems to have finally hit Bloomington, I'm happy to say that I really love it here.  I went to a small liberal arts college in Meadville, PA named Allegheny College, where I graduated with the "unusual combination" of a Bachelor of the Arts in Music (Vocal) and Women's Studies, with a minor in Black Studies.  I went on from Allegheny to pursue my Master's degree in Music History and Literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (known as IUP), and it was there that I met my Music Library mentor, and there I got the notion to continue my education in Music Librarianship.  Thus, I am a Master of Library Science candidate with a specialization in Music Librarianship.  This internship is part of my required coursework, but I am actually very excited about it.

The following is the goals and outline of duties that is part of my first assignment for the course in general:

Goals: 

The intern will be working within an existing collections development policy. She will create a desiderata list based on a topic of interest and work on finding appropriate items to enhance the library's existing collection. She will work with order processing, and learn and hone skills in Workflow, as well as catalog searching. She will also become educated on vendor relationships, and will attend meetings with library personnel to observe these vendor-library interactions. She will also be responsible for the reading of two books by R. Michael Fling: Library Acquisitions of Music and Guide to Developing a Library Music Collection.

Duties:

• Assist with Order Processing 
• Provide input on which titles to firm order
• Create a cohesive desiderata list containing several types of media, from which titles will be ordered at conclusion of internship
• Attend meetings with Vendors (such as YBP)
• Assist in other areas of Acquisitions and Collection Development as called upon
• Read the two texts by R. Michael Fling
• Maintain a blog about experiences

Obviously that last one prompted the creation of this blog, The Sharp (#) Intern.  (Yes, I am fully aware that it's a slightly ridiculous pun.)  But this is it!  I hope you, as the reader, enjoys the ride as much as I do/will/hope I will.