Saturday, November 15, 2008

What does "information literacy" mean in a music environment?

16 - 18 June, 2008 librarians working in higher music education institutions met in Reykjavik. Our colleagues at Iceland Academy of the Arts, with the library director Lisa Valdimarsdóttir as head of the organizing committee, had prepared a fantastic programme for us. One session was devoted to discussions around the Bologna process. We were divided into groups - each group received one specific question. We had only about half an hour for the group discussion before we met and presented summaries for eachother! I was actually quite impressed that so much came out of this!

With kind permission I post the summary of group one below. Tone Elofsson, head librarian of The Norwegian Academy of Music, made the outline:

Group no. 1

What does “information literacy” mean in a music environment?

First of all teaching information literacy at a higher music education institution is not limited to
text. Both printed music and sound recordings must be included. One of the tasks will be to make the students aware of the importance of different editions of printed music, point out the difference between Urtext editions and later editions and also give access to digitized manuscripts when possible. Showing the need of listening to many recordings of the same composition – get to know about the change of style, different interpretations, versions played on original instruments etc. Today it is also expected that musicians should be able to communicate about the music they perform, and often they even have to write program notes. Here the library could contribute through teaching the students how to search and find suitable texts from printed sources and databases.

Tone Elofsson

2 comments:

sergei3 said...

Hi Pia,

First of all, I would like to recommend an article in the March 2006 issue of Music Library Association _Notes_, "Information Literacy Instructional
Objectives For Undergraduate
Music Students" by Paul Cary and Laurie J. Sampsel, pages 663-679. The article summarizes a lot of previous literature (much of it in _Notes_) on the topic, and raises many issues.
On the question of definition, Cary and Sampsel note that the American Library Association defines information literacy as the ability to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” In 2000, the Association of College and Research Libraries (part of ALA) developed information literacy standards for undergraduates. When MLA's Bibliographic Instruction Subcommittee set out to develop standards for music undergraduates, they quickly decided to model their music information literacy standards on the ACRL standards. At the 2004 MLA annual meeting, the Subcommittee presented draft standards, which went through a process of review, comment, and revision by both ACRL and the MLA Board, until the standards were approved by both associations in September 2005.
The standards themselves were published at the end of the March 2006 article in _Notes_, but they may also be found at the MLA website (http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/resources/mlacreated.shtml). Closely read, I believe these standards pose a number of different answers to your question.

John Shepard, Head
Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library
Berkeley, California 94720-6000

Pia Shekhter said...

Hi John,

Yes, indeed this was most illuminating! Thank you very much for your reply, which I think will be valuable for many colleagues within IAML.

Pia