Home | Access to Music (Summary)
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SUMMARY

SCOPE
This guideline covers access to music in digital formats, standards for resources, staffing and staff development.

POLICY ISSUES 
The personal consumption of music and ‘film’ via its various physical carriers (CD-ROM, DVD, video etc) and increasingly through the Internet, is now a major ingredient in the daily life, leisure and education of most Europeans. Public libraries provide an important component of this provision. But there are enormous variations in the levels of music stock and services. Only one European country (Denmark) specifies music in any form in government legislation on public libraries. 

Music was a pioneer in using ICT to distribute and access cultural artefacts. The increasing ease of downloading music has made "fighting the free" (Jupiter Research) a major issue for commercial producers and distributors. However it is clear that simply branding all freely accessible music as illegal does not meet the requirements of public libraries. Public music libraries and archives have an important role to play in finding a fair balance for all those involved in music, from producers to consumers, as part of their contribution to social inclusion, lifelong learning, access for disabled people, and the promotion of cultural diversity.
Public libraries should develop a set of guidelines and means to continue allowing their readers and listeners to access music without violating intellectual property rights even in the digital environment.

But the need for public libraries to meet the challenges of the digital environment goes far beyond mere copyright issues: "In order to extend the classical functions of libraries into the digital world - to accumulate and to preserve knowledge, to provide access to the society's cultural artefacts, and to foster communication, education and scholarship - it is necessary to keep pace with technological, legal and standardisation developments in the multimedia music area." (MUSICNETWORK Working Group Music Libraries: Objectives, version Feb 12, 2003, online at
http://www.interactivemusicnetwork.org/wg_libraries/
upload/musicnetwork-wgml-objectives-030212.pdf)

Training for music librarians remains limited with only a few good examples of innovation and development.

GOOD PRACTICE
Public libraries should:

• take advantage of the Internet and ensure that national guides to services and online directories to holdings of audio-visual resources are produced;

• ensure that they are in a position to offer the best possible services to ethnic minorities and to those with disabilities; 

• pay particular attention to the problems of information retrieval in their field. Those standards which exist in the fields of bibliographic description and item identification should be adhered to in order to address the need for interoperability;

• consider adding new information to the online catalogue such as sound files and making more material, available on-line, perhaps taking on a role as producers of material. (e.g. by digitising and making available scores and recordings, or by integrating digital content in various media formats to multimedia formats).

FUTURE AGENDA

• Technically, libraries will soon be in a position to provide their users with whatever recording is needed, so a solution will need to be found to the complex economic, copyright and royalty issues.

• Libraries, museums and archives will themselves make music and video digitally available as text, sound or images, especially that which is created in a local or regional context.

• Ways of improving seamless retrieval of music resources and the feasibility of a single European gateway to music resources on the Internet should be explored.

• A fuller technical research agenda should be developed and implemented. 

• A set of core courses will need to be developed for music librarianship in the electronic age. 

Home | Access to Music (Summary)
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