Recently the Music Library began a new service that significantly alters the way in which students listen to sound recordings. Students who were enrolled in the African Music course taught by Blair ethnomusicologist Gregory Barz were required to listen to assigned recordings that the library had digitized and placed on a streaming media server. This was the first time that students could listen to sound recordings owned by the library without playing the actual recording.

Since that first course, we have distributed more than 600 individual selections for fourteen courses and streamed them to students using the library's electronic reserve system. We estimate that between 800 to 1,000 students have been enrolled in courses that made use of this service. The technology has been particularly useful for students whose departments are not within the Blair School of Music and who would otherwise not need to come to the Music Library. Streaming audio reserves allow students to listen to required course assignments at hours that are convenient for them, anytime, day or night. We have removed a barrier to access for our students by creating an environment in which they decide when and where they listen. In one month alone, reserve listings for music courses were accessed more than 1,200 times!

The shift toward streaming audio for course reserves marks only one of the recent changes at the Music Library. In 2001, the library completed a major renovation and expansion that doubled its physical size. After the renovation, circulation statistics surged and the Music Library is now the third busiest library on campus (after Central and Divinity) in terms of total items charged to patrons. Additionally, we answer twice as many reference questions as we did before the renovation.

One of the most intriguing planned developments for streaming audio is related to Professor Barz's work. In 2002, Dr. Barz was contacted by the United States Embassy in Uganda, where he would soon be conducting research on a Fulbright fellowship. In May, Clark and Barz traveled to Uganda with high-level recording equipment to begin collecting music for the archive. After establishing a network in Africa, they turned over their equipment to Centurio Balikoowa, a world-famous Ugandan traditional artist and close friend of Barz who has visited Vanderbilt several times. Balikoowa agreed to travel to rural villages and record music over the span of one year, sending CDs back to Barz and Clark every month.

Catherine Gick
in the Music Library

The Music Library intends to build a free, Web-based digital library of these recordings that can be accessed anywhere in the world. The music librarian for cataloging, Catherine Gick, will provide the descriptive information (metadata) that will allow the collection to be searched. The user will be able to listen to streams of the recordings as if he or she were in the library. If all goes as intended, the project will become the largest freely available field recording archive in the world. It will give the library staff needed expertise in the storage, organization, and dissemination of digital recordings of serious scholarly value that will inform our future direction in building digital library collections.

With a beautiful facility and digital library programs based on streaming media, the Vanderbilt Music Library stands at an exciting nexus of offering both traditional and emerging digital library service. Regardless of the format of our resources, our core philosophy, as stated in our mission statement, is "to serve the undergraduate programs...by acquiring, organizing, and preserving a comprehensive collection of musical information and by providing access to that information through personal interaction and information technology, to the fullest extent of our abilities and resources."