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.