Greetings!
We find ourselves already midway through the fall semester. The summer was busy and eventful; the remainder of the calendar year promises to bring us additional challenges and successes.
Our recent successes include cosponsoring with the Max Kade Institute a symposium on German-American music and completing the Robert Fountain Archives project and website. In addition, we are nearing the completion of a significant music databases project. This project involves making our locally developed databases of music special collections materials available for cross database searching on the web. Details will follow when the databases become publicly available next semester.
More exciting news appeared in a report on the annual use statistics for electronic reserves. During the 2001–02 academic year, 160,656 sound files for music course reserves were requested by authenticated listeners. Because we previously were unable to track course listening statistics at the "composition" level, no one believed that we were as busy as we were. During one week in February when two service courses had exams on the same Tuesday morning, we hit 11,000 requests in two days. The library administrators wanted to know how many music majors we had to effect such use. We gently reminded them that we also serve countless non-music majors. Another 19,222 .pdf files of readings or scores were retrieved during the same period.
Other noteworthy activities include making final plans for a compact shelving installation in the Audio Facility that will be done over semester break. Although we will double our shelving capacity, faculty will no longer be able to browse the shelves easily. Despite this inconvenience, we hope the increased capacity will more than compensate.
Due to my half time activities in Special Collections, Paul Friedman has been assisting the Music Library staff in a full time capacity. Paul aspires to be a music librarian and is already serving his second term as the graduate student representative to the University Library Committee. We are pleased to have Paul's services during this period, and he has already contributed to the success of the library's operations.
On behalf of the staff, have a Happy Thanksgiving and a joyous holiday season!