Commission on Service and Training

Eight speakers in two sessions, and full and engaging audiences at both–we must be getting something right! To be fair, our first session on 25 July was billed as a round table, so audience participation was to be assumed. Fears that it might not be forthcoming, or residual apprehension arising from inviting speakers who prior to the conference were little more than one end of an e-mail correspondence, happily proved completely unfounded in both cases. The title, Educational Training for the Professional Development of Music Library Staff, was not our own but hit the nail squarely on the head. Our concern here was not the education of our users, but of those who provide the service and who, in an age of cuts and budgetary restraints, might not initially have the skills to do so. Given that this is a problem which shows no signs of receding, what best practice can we abstract from our various responses if we are to attempt to define a set of core skills for music librarians? Keith Cochrane spoke first about the music librarianship courses he teaches at Indiana University, which offers a 2-year MLS and a 3-year Musicology MA with a music library module, together with two annual internships. A balance is maintained between bibliographic and management skills, with students encouraged to engage critically with both how individual libraries meet users’ needs and how the material they contain supports scholarship. Each completes a final own-choice project, which might embrace wider topics like copyright or digitisation. Internships are consciously hands-on and address issues such as stock control and acquisitions. Outlining the situation in Germany, Jurgen Diet (Bavarian State Library) pointed out that three German universities offer degrees specifically in music librarianship. One is the Media University in Stuttgart at which he teaches; the others are in Hanover and Leipzig. The Media University’s two BA courses offer the option of either a practical or more theoretical grounding in the subject, their differences akin to those between the Library and Information and Library Science courses encountered elsewhere. A part-time MA course includes modules in music management, collection development, bibliography, digital libraries and digital archiving, each of which can also be taken as a stand-alone module, which in turn increasingly offers the opportunity for distance learning. Leipzig also offers both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes which can be linked to musicological study, while the BA Information Management course at Hanover includes grounding in music history as well as bibliographic and management training. Jurgen also mentioned the courses organised by the German branch of IAML. These are usually linked to annual conferences and range from a basic ‘Musik fur Anfanger’ to those on more focussed topics such as electronic resources. The role of IAML/MLA as trainers was continued by Holling Smith-Borne (Vanderbilt University, Nashville) who introduced the programmes offered by the MLA in the USA. Training needs expressed at MLA conferences have led to the development of course materials which can be used elsewhere in face to face sessions; this was felt to be more successful than having training sessions at the conferences themselves, as outside speakers didn’t always respond to the real needs of attendees. The MLA training programme, started in 2008, now has sixty trainers, who must be MLA members with a recognised library qualification and a minimum of five years’ experience in library work They target non-specialist librarians, music specialists seeking to upgrade their skills, library students, and library support staff, and include topics such as cataloguing and music resources. Each course has stated learning outcomes with which the trainers must be familiar and, as much training still occurs at conferences, the importance of follow-up contact is stressed. In rounding off the presentations with an overview of the courses offered by the UK and Ireland branch, my aim was both to give an account of the political vicissitudes of recent decades which have impacted on UK library provision and thereby necessitated these courses, and to present each course in terms of the core skills enshrined in its learning outcomes.