The Promise of Online Music

Every few decades, audio formats change, and libraries rebuild their music collections. We've gone from 78s to LPs, then from LPs to CDs. While CDs stand to be produced for quite some time, it's not clear how long large library CD collections—with many recordings going back to the mid-1980s—will last. Today, the format shift is on again as librarians attempt to offer patrons what they really want: online audio.

Even those who would never download an illegal sound file find the new format wildly popular, offering the opportunity to tune in anytime, anywhere. For librarians and educators, this format shift opens up a wealth of new opportunities.

In fact, academic librarians were among the pioneers who developed online delivery of audio and its technological infrastructures in the 1990s. Many have years of experience in providing it to their patrons but mostly behind the closed doors of password-protected course reserves systems.

At the Haverford College Music Library, PA, we started streaming digital audio files for college course reserves six years ago. Armed with a standard desktop computer, a souped-up sound card, and digitizing software, we cranked out digital copies from our own collection. These we made available with streaming technology through Blackboard, our password-protected course management system.

Our aim was access. As Rebecca Davis, a Haverford junior, put it, "I have classes and rehearsals all day. Often I don't get started on my listening until well after the library has closed." We wanted our students to be free to listen to their assignments any time, day or night, in the comfort of their dorm rooms as well as the quiet of the music library. We also wanted to serve a class of 150 with the same ease as a class of five.

Many college libraries today want the same thing (though just as many may not have jumped on the digitizing bandwagon). Some opt instead to subscribe to some of the new commercial audio services. Others find that a mixture—homegrown and commercial—is the way to go.

Either way, librarians and faculty recognize digital audio has the potential to do much more than simply play, pause, and fast-forward. In-house and commercial services are beginning to offer a range of associated content that can be used for teaching and learning, making the musical content of these services more powerful.

One homegrown system stands out for its breadth of content, range of media types, and potential for meaningful pedagogical use. A service called Variations was developed at Indiana University (IU) in 1996. It tackled the problem of streaming audio files when few were streaming anything. Ultimately, IU's database held over 10,000 fully digitized sound recordings.

Building on the success of Variations, in 2001 IU's Digital Library Program started Variations2, with support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Variations2 is a full-fledged digital music library that delivers streaming audio, scanned score images, and encoded score notation, all of which come from IU's vast music collection. Much more than an online reserves system, Variations2 is a robust digital delivery system with powerful tools for enhancing teaching and learning.

With the exception of a few off-site test institutions, the system is currently limited to use on the IU campus. However, IU is interested in bringing the technology behind Variations2 to a wider audience. In the works are plans to turn the application-driven interface (with software installed on the client's workstation) into a web-based product, as well as to provide back-end server solutions that meet the needs of a range of libraries. The library is seeking funds to develop the product further for non-IU use.

"Many different types of libraries, not just large music libraries like ours, are interested in implementing a system like Variations2," says Philip Ponella, director of IU's William and Gayle Cook Music Library and Variations project director. "Students in seemingly all disciplines now prefer to get their music this way." Libraries might soon be able to replicate IU's system and load and distribute their own mix of content.

Commercial audio subscription services have recently come to market—each presenting a different slice of the musical pie. Some focus on specific labels, others a particular genre of music. They all allow for the streaming of audio tracks to the user.

The first commercial service aimed at libraries was Classical Music Library, founded as Classical.com in 1999 and bought by Alexander Street Press in 2004. Billed as the "world's largest multilabel database of recordings for listening and learning in libraries," Classical pulls from 32 labels and contains over 35,000 tracks. Its greatest strengths are its range of classical music genres and its ever-growing database.

Since purchasing Classical Music Library, Alexander Street has used Classical's underlying technology to expand its traditional humanities offerings to include two more audio services, Smithsonian Global Sound and African American Song. Global Sound currently presents over 35,000 tracks from the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings as well as archival collections from South Africa's International Library of African Music and India's Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology.

Launched in 2004, Naxos Music Library contains some 85,000 tracks of music, including the complete catalogs of the Naxos, Marco Polo, and Da Capo labels. The repertoire is primarily classical but also includes jazz, world, and folk music.

One new service, Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM), was not available for testing. A partnership between New York University and New World Records, DRAM reportedly contains over 1200 recordings of varying genres of American music. (For more on all these services, see "Music's Players," p. 46.)

These commercial options do not replace the collections built by librarians, but librarians do view them as collection supplements. Still, these services and their associated content mark a new era in library-classroom partnership that stands to change the way music is taught and learned.

Among the new options that both the commercial and the homegrown systems offer, the most popular is the pairing of a recording and its musical score. Professors have required that students listen to sound recordings with score in hand for decades, and the online catalog brings these varying instances of a work together. What's great about the online audio environment is the extreme ease with which recording and score may be easily married.

Naxos Music Library is the only commercial online service that has scores available to use with its recordings, having joined forces with SheetMusicNow. Libraries can subscribe to both Naxos and SheetMusicNow at a discounted rate. SheetMusicNow provides online editions of musical scores of over 14,000 works, though, not so surprisingly, the collection is largely of the "sheet music" variety. You won't find the score to a complete opera, for instance, only a select few famous arias. SheetMusicNow employs a strong array of digital rights management (DRM) tools in order to prevent unauthorized downloading and copying. The DRM and the company's per item download model make it a less attractive option than if it used a subscription model.

Variations2 includes scanned score images from IU's Cook Music Library collection. Through the proper work on back-end metadata, these have been "hooked up" with one or more sound recordings and even allow for the automatic turning of pages as the recording plays. Users also have a range of drawing and annotating tools that allow them to make detailed analyses on the online scores.

It's been said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," but in the case of online audio, text seems to be the fast friend of music. Online audio collections offer a range of supplementary texts. Digital collections that started out as collections of LPs or CDs emphasize the individual album and frequently provide the original liner notes. Naxos, for instance, offers the text of the original liner notes in a combination of web and PDF formats.

Classical Music Library, on the other hand, emphasizes the piece or complete musical work. It provides an in-house reference guide to each piece of music, as well as the composer and artists. Unfortunately, none of these texts is signed, and the quality varies. Yet Classical makes up for this deficiency by linking to the online version of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (presuming the library also subscribes). While listening to Mahler's Eighth Symphony, the user can click on a link and be taken to the New Grove article on Mahler.

Smithsonian Global Sound presents texts written specifically for featured pieces of music, artists, and so on. However, like Classical's in-house reference guides, these, too, are unsigned. A feature unique to Global Sound is "Synchrotext," which presents scrolling texts of transcriptions and translations of some of its oral performances.

In addition to its liner notes, Naxos offers in-house reference sources, including opera synopses and libretti (the latter without translations at this point), a glossary of musical terms, and a pronunciation guide."

A notable feature of most online audio systems is the ability to make playlists. These can be as simple as "four pieces I know I'll be coming back to again" to large groupings of pieces that have some intellectual connection.

In all of these services, faculty and librarians can set up folders or playlists as assignments: the pieces in the current week's unit, for instance, or all the pieces needed for an entire semester (just like a reserve list). Each track also has a static URL that may be embedded in a web page or course management system.

Variations2 allows the user to create playlists of individual pieces but also allows the user to set bookmarks at any point along the time line of the sound file. The user could easily compare phrases of music side by side this way. Users may also import and export playlists, an effective way to dole out assignments and collect homework.

As librarians, we are keenly aware of how our users interact with a search interface. Besides finding known items based on certain criteria, a good search interface can help users look at the information in ways they have never considered. Several of the online audio systems have mechanisms to dig deep and make meaningful, and sometimes unusual, connections.

A familiar assignment is to compare two recordings of the same piece. Many of these systems contain multiple versions of musical works that can be searched for and played in one fell swoop.

Both Classical Music Library and Variations2 present the option in their respective search interfaces to specify the key of the pieces retrieved. Pulling up all works (or movements) in A minor by Antonín Dvorák may lead the listener to new discoveries.

What if you only want pieces of music composed in 1921? Easy enough to accomplish in Naxos—and what a fascinating list it is (Bartók, Ives, Saint-Saëns, Sousa, and Vaughn-Williams). Smithsonian Global Sound has only a very simple keyword search box but makes up for this by presenting a number of ways to browse across and drill down into the collection. Geographic area, instrument type, culture group, ensemble type, and language are all entry points. This type of granular search is impossible with the traditional OPAC.

Online music is having an impact on reference also. According to Alisa Rata, music, theater, and dance librarian at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, reference questions involving sound recordings have declined since implementing Classical Music Library. "Clearly the students are finding it easier to use than our own online library catalog," says Rata.

We're still in the early days of online audio systems, and we're just beginning to see their potential. Also, online audio brings with it many of the same challenges we've been dealing with in online journal content. How comfortable are we with not owning the materials we provide? How stable are the companies we are investing in, and what contingency plans are in place if a company goes belly-up? Finally, how do we pay for these new services.

These are difficult questions. Still, the benefits of online audio outweigh any of the difficulties. "There is no going back; the changes will continue to happen," says IU's Ponella. "In addition to meeting the needs of today's students we are also educating the faculty of tomorrow. The way our students learn today will inform how they teach in the future."