The cat that ate the candle and the ewe with the crooked horn from Europeana sounds - music in libraries

The cat that ate the candle and the ewe with the crooked horn post appeared on the Europeana blog, from Europeana sounds. Go away and look/listen to this blog post before reading on.  You might like to explore Discover Rap music in Portugal with the project RAPortugal 1986–1999 as well.

Europeana sounds, at a national/international level, is doing what public libraries need to do locally - make people more aware of music and local audio, as well as collect and preserve it. I have written about this before.

Europeana sounds highlights the need for local collecting of music. Think about it in your library as a way of recording information about the community for local studies.  What music is being played now?  Capital City Records from Edmonton Public Library is an excellent example of local music collecting for a public library, for local studies and for current use.

Join Ralph McDaniels to Celebrate Hip Hop History Month! | Queens Library

Join Ralph McDaniels to Celebrate Hip Hop History Month! | Queens Library



This is lovely.  This is a celebration of music and culture and it is also local studies.  Great to see this happening.  Make sure you read the article at the link above.

current music as part of the local studies collection

Denver Public Library has a local music site (you can listen to samples if you don't have a library card from them) as do Madison Public Library, Johnson County Library and others.

Music is important, and it has been harder to collect local content in this area.  These libraries have found a solution and it also makes it easy for people to listen to local musicians. This has many excellent local studies possibilities as well as current content.

I found out about these examples because I follow the Library as incubator project blog.

Local studies, music and dance - a few ideas

Music seems to be under represented in many local studies collections in public libraries.   It could be that I am looking in the wrong places, however, I don't see many public libraries anywhere with a music collection as part of how they collect and tell the local stories of their community, and few with stories of music from or about their area.  I realise that this is a difficult area, but it is also possible to collect in these areas, as Cork, for example is doing.

Music is a way for story telling for the local community, as bands and singing groups interact in different such as in pubs or community halls.  Music is an important connector for a community and can be important as a community meeting point.  There is much potential for oral histories to be done in this area, and to collect music which has been created as part of library programs.


Exhibit: 1908, When the Democrats Came to Denver from The Denver Public Library on Vimeo.

Some songs specifically mention place names and these should be collected for local studies, in the same way some libraries include recipe books in local studies collections when they have been written by locals (for example books by Bill Granger and Kylie Kwong form part of the local studies collection at Surry Hills Library, only a few minutes from where their restaurants are located).  

Working with local musicians (and they don't have to be famous, just local) as a way of collecting audio and video content is important. They don’t have to be famous, but being local is important.  Don’t forget copyright, work with it.

The Library of Congress has a national jukebox, you could have a local one.  The Smithsonian has Folkways, which has some very local music as part of the collection.

A recent article from the MIT Centre for Civic Media called Dancing in the square: street music as activism, shows some aspects as to why music is a crucial for local studies collections as it helps to tell the story of a community.  This article about punk rock from New York has some similar inspiration for local studies work.  Dongan Hills Public Library has a Wuseum, because of hip hop.   I think there are exciting music or music related collecting opportunities for local studies collections.  You might even want to collect the sounds of your community, expanding the idea of acoustic records of your area (as the British Library is doing).

I haven't mentioned dance much, but the principles are basically the same.  Your local studies information/archives/recordings in the library will be tracking local changes over time - a very exciting thing to be able to do.

I had just finished this post when I saw this Keeping things fresh: Steampunk rapper Professor Elemental on hip-hop and education and this one by Matt Finch.  Both of these posts help show (implicitly) the importance of music to a local studies collection in a public library.