Last Sibley Muse

The last volume of the Sibley Muse is now available for download here. The issue includes and article about the changes New Grove Online will see later this month, a final issue wrapup of the Muse's run by Dan Zager, Staff News, and a page with our Intersession and Summer hours.

End of semester hours

Please note the extended hours this week.

Monday May 5 8:00AM – 11:00PM
Tuesday May 6 8:00AM – midnight
Wednesday May 7 8:00AM – midnight
Thursday May 8 8:00AM – midnight
Friday May 9 8:00AM – 5:00PM
Saturday May 10 1:00PM – 5:00PM

GRADUATION WEEK
Sunday May 11 closed
Monday – Friday 9:00AM – 5:00PM

Interesting RISM-related website

The May/June 2008 issue of Choir & Organ arrived yesterday, with an interesting article about a website entitled RISM Music Manuscripts (1600 to 1800) in British and Irish Libraries. According to the article this website "provides descriptions and sources of 62,000 pieces of manuscript music." It is a regional (British and Irish) subset of the larger RISM A/II database. Check out the website at www.rism.org.uk

Free Endnote download for UR

We recently received notice that UR students, faculty and staff may now download the EndNote client for PC or MAC from this ITS page free of charge. Yes, we have licensed EndNote for the entire University. Find out how to get help with EndNote on this library page or the River Campus Libraries' A-Z Database listings.

EndNote is a citation management software, similar to RefWorks. Use it to store, manage, and search for bibliographic references. EndNote formats citations, figures, and tables in Microsoft Word with the Cite While You Write feature, and allows creation of bibliographies with other word processors.

How does EndNote differ from Refworks? Whether you use (or recommend) one product or the other depends on individual needs and situation. Pat Sulouff will address the difference in greater detail in an orientation session that she will soon offer on River Campus, but briefly, here are a few reasons that people have given for preferring EndNote:

- It is not dependent on Internet access
- Output styles are more sophisticated
- Filters are configurable
- Connection files are more sophisticated
- More ability to customize

No one at Sibley has yet done any testing of either Endnote or Refworks to see how they handle the difficulties posed when citing printed music, sound recordings, or video. If any reader of this blog has such experience and would care to comment we would be happy to hear about both positives and negatives.

MLA Wrap

Not only was Sibley well represented at MLA, but several former Eastman students and Sibley colleagues were also spotted there (including Phil Ponella, Lara Snyder, and Mary Wallace Davidson).

As far as Sibley contributions go, several of us gave presentations. Dan Zager gave a talk on teaching music bibliography, and specifically on the teaching of a source like RISM to masters performance majors. Gerry Szymanski, chair of the Information Sharing Subcommittee, led a very well attended session on Web 2.0 products that various libraries are using. Gerry's own 10 minutes was spent sharing information on Pandora.

Alice Carli, Jim Farrington, and Linda Blair presented a poster session on Sibley's score digitization efforts. This will be put up electronically in the near future, and we'll add a link to it when that happens. Alice was also part of a session in her role as outgoing chair of the Peservation Cmmittee, discussing the new committee's website. Jim also played in the MLA Big Band, a slideshow of which can be seen here.

Librarians on the Loose

This week is the 77th annual meeting of the Music Library Association. As usual, most of the librarians from Sibley will be attending and participating. Those who will be traveling from Rochester to Newport, RI are:


Linda Blair
Alice Carli
Jim Farrington
Rebecca McCallum
Rick McRae
Gerry Szymanski
Dale Vargason
Dan Zager


Most of us will be leaving either Tuesday or Wednesday, and will be back at Sibley on Monday, February 25. For those interested in the meeting, you can view all the details here, and even follow the conference blog.

Digital scores

As many of you know, Sibley began digitizing scores that are in the Public Domain (that is, there are no copyright restrictions) several years ago. We make them available in the University's digital repository, UR Research. Within the repository, Sibley has a "community" (the ESM Theory Department also has a recently-instituted community). Within the community, we have--so far--three collections:

Musical Scores
ESM Theses and Dissertations
DMA Papers

The latter two collections will be the subject of a later post. The Musical Scores collection, however, is worth a post of its own. It is the single most used collection in the university's digital repository. Although having less than 40% of the repository's total objects, it accounts for 80% of all downloads from the repository. Since statistics started to be gathered in early 2005, there have been over 1.1 million downloads* from the approximately 2600 titles that have been put in Musical Scores.

Although it is titled Musical Scores, it also contains whatever books and periodicals we have digitized. There haven't been many of these, but some of those that have been digitized are pretty interesting, including:

The Black Hercules, or The adventures of a banjo player (1884)
S.S. Stewart’s banjo and guitar journal, of which we have a nearly complete run from 1884-1900
Piobaireachd, its origin and construction (1915) by John Grant, on the bagpipe
A history of music for the use of young students (1879) by W. S. Rockstro

The repository is indexed by all of the search engines (e.g. Google), and we also make links from Voyager and Worldcat (OCLC).

*A download in this context is anytime someone clicks on the pdf link and views the score, not just simply page views of the metadata.