 I'm Diane Cowan and I am the Virtual Services Librarian at the Santa Cruz Public Libraries and I'm going to be talking to you today about SoundSwell, the Santa Cruz Public Libraries local music collection. SoundSwell was originally funded by an LSTA Eureka grant for the proof of concept phase of the project and it was created in partnership with the Santa Cruz rehearsal studios. So SoundSwell is the streaming database of local music that library card holders can download for free. It establishes a historical archive of local music that people can listen to for years to come. It is the only discovery tool for local music that I'm aware of and it really expands access to local music in a way that compensates and respects the art of the musician and we pay a two-year licensing fee for our users to be able to download the music and then after the contracts expire, the music is still available in a streaming format only but not in a downloadable format. So it's always a good idea to start with why and I'll be perfectly honest. As Heather mentioned, I was a Eureka Leadership Institute member in 2012 and I was looking for a project. So I had just seen this article in Library Journal about the Iowa City local music project. I was wondering, you know, oh, is this something that would be a good fit for my community because I know we had a lot of good musicians but I wasn't really connected to the local music scene and I didn't know if we were going to have a lot of community support for something like that. So it was just kind of sitting on the back burner there for a while. And then something really amazing happened. This part of my job is the Virtual Services Librarian. Of course, I monitored the library's social networks and really literally just as I was pondering the question of community support for a project like this, I got messages or the library received messages on both Facebook and Twitter from a member of the community who had also learned about the Iowa City local music project from a civilian news blog, I think it was Boing Boing. And she said that this would be a great thing and couldn't we do this with our library and she even offered to help. So I set up a conversation with her and it turned out that this person was deeply entrenched in the local music scene that she owned a small record label and the local rehearsal studio. So at this point I really felt like the planet's at a line and I had my project and then it really merited some serious consideration. So I thought it was time to take a little look outward and really do some investigation into the music community and the community as a whole to see kind of how we could make it have the most impact. So I did a community assessment that really focused in on the music and had some interesting findings. There's the great morgani. What I found was that Santa Cruz is of course a unique community with an artistic flair and we have a really, really huge and active local music scene with a lot of artists working in a variety of genres. And Santa Cruz is trying to promote this artistic flair in terms of economic development by establishing a new identity for itself as an arts destination. But a look at the arts master plan really reveals that the visual arts are completely overshadowing the musical arts in terms of institutional support which has been events based and biased towards certain genres like jazz and classical. So the music community in Santa Cruz is really facing some challenges. First of all, music lovers don't have a lot of opportunities for discovering local music beyond that chance encounter at a restaurant or a bar. iTunes and subscription services usually don't have a geographic based discovery tool. And then of course they take a big chunk out of the fees which can be challenging for just starting out musicians. And then when it comes to those large scale local events, I found that our local musicians were often competing with out of the area performers. So when it comes to planning and institutional support, musicians in Santa Cruz are really getting thrown under the bus to the detriment of the musicians and I think the community as a whole. So I really kind of see sounds well as both a compliment and an alternative to this event based local music discovery and promotion. It's free, it's year round, it's weather resistant and it's kind of a one stop location where you can discover local music in Santa Cruz. And then by helping musicians to grow their fan base locally, I think it can really have an impact on venue attendance and possibly stimulate economic development in the musical arts. It also, it really communicates the value of local music on an institutional level because after all the library is a government agency. But most importantly, sounds well builds community. And I think Bo Bradbury said it way better than I ever could and this is a direct quote and there he is there. It's so exciting that you're doing this project because it really brings the listeners and the musical and artistic community together. And sounds well definitely does bring the musical community and its listeners together. But it's also positioned the library as a real player in the local arts and music scene. And we have a whole new set of relationships between the library, the arts, the media and musicians than we used to. So building the database really focused on these three project areas, at least for the proof of concept phase. Securing content, building the database and so much data entry that I try to block it out. And of course the biggest part of securing content was relationship building. You know of course before then we had to develop a license agreement which Iowa City was kind enough to share with me. And develop selection criteria for inclusion in the database. Now that turned out to be way more complicated than I had ever imagined. Even just defining local music turned out to be a huge challenge. And I learned a lot about what it means for a local music scene to have a really strong geographic identity. And learning that lesson actually is what really helped me be able to go out there and build those relationships and talk to musicians in a different way and create the materials I needed to form these partnerships. So we used OMEKA to build the database which is an open source digital archive software that you know libraries, archives and museums use. It's very flexible, it uses Dublin Core and it allows you to really bring in a lot of different types of objects. And we already had a OMEKA database server built. So I thought yep that's what we're using. But even then there was still a lot to do you know ripping, scanning. And then we also used SoundCloud which is a music sharing site to handle the streaming. So there was a lot of work in getting that to work on the back end. So we also had some challenges. Language turned out to be a really big hurdle. Catalogging and data entry were pretty challenging. And then storage of course. So as far as language goes, I speak librarian, not musician. And I had to learn how to talk to these musicians in a whole different way. In a way that sounded compelling to them. And it really was a completely different language. But one place where librarians speak and musicians speak really came together was when we talked about the historical archive aspect of the project. And every single musician really valued the opportunity to become a part of the historical record of the local music of Santa Cruz. And I just want to share this example. Billy Hawk Epstein is a local musician and he has worked in Santa Cruz for more than 20 years playing shows. And now he has some health conditions that prevent him from performing. And he sent me this beautiful email and he was just so thankful to have a way to get his music out into the community. And to know that it was going to be in the archive. So just really good feedback. And yeah, so cataloging and data entry were really a nightmare when doing this project. There are no authority files for these musicians. And some of them honestly change pseudonyms as often as their socks. Of course we tried to maintain some kind of consistency between the Mark record and the Dublin core. But it was really important to make the database really user friendly. And that's the thing about Dublin core is it can be as user friendly as you want. So there's not a lot of consistency. And then the data entry was just so tedious and time consuming that I'm going to kind of gloss over that because I don't want to think about it. And then finally we had some storage problems. And I know that this is something that goes beyond this project, beyond libraries, organizations everywhere. Storage is expensive and more and more of our stuff is digital and needs to be backed up. This is something we all have to deal with. But it was literally just as we were about to go live, the server was full and we ran out of space. And so we had to come up with a short term fix really quickly, which we did. We did by repurposing an old server that was going to die. And we're still working on that long term solution. But you know all of these challenges and all of that data entry work, it's really worth it because everybody enjoys music. It's part of our individual and shared identities. And music brings people together. Preserving that and making it available to our communities is extremely valuable. And it really reinforces that hyper-local role of libraries as creators and curators and disseminators of that unique content and culture. So the future. So I have some short term plans, some medium term goals, and then some long term ideas and possibilities. In the short term I have to be working on expanding that collection incrementally by getting the word out to more and more musicians and bringing them in. We have to plan for these two-year cycles of complete collection overturn, which means all that data entry work again. And then finding a really nice way to organize the music that comes from the expired contracts into the historical archive, which kind of leads into the medium term goals, which is to bring in other objects, newspaper articles, video clips, other pieces of memorabilia that can be digitized in order to create kind of a band page for each band as we move forward in creating an archive. And then possibly even going back in time and filling in the history of local music. And then in the long term I really do think that the project lends itself to the Discover and Go model where different libraries pay into a centralized IT framework and then negotiate with the musicians in their communities for the benefit of the entire network. And I think you would all agree that the San Francisco Bay Area is the place to do this kind of thing. So talk to me. And now I just thought we'd take a quick look. Super quick. So here we are. It's scmusic.SantaCruisepl.org is the direct URL. And as you can see, we've got a featured album. You can see the most recent editions. And you can browse by genre, browse by album. When you browse by genre, you get this cool little word cloud. And of course the larger words are the genres that we have the most music in. So as you can see, we've got a lot of folk singers in Santa Cruz. I'm going to go ahead and click on Browse Albums. You can, you know, of course title, author, you know, or the date that it was added if you've already downloaded everything in the database and you want to see what's new. Oh yeah, the Raging Grannies are the most recent edition. But actually I think I'm just going to do a search so that I don't end up making you guys listen to something too weird. So this is the album Grow Down. So this here is the sound cloud working on the back end to make it look nice and pretty for us. Ooh, that is touchy. So people can just stream and listen to the music if they want. And then to download, you would just, you know, click on a song. Oh, that takes us to the authentication piece. And I'll just, too bad we can't listen to the music while I'm typing. So I've entered my username and password and it just brings up a zip file, which I'm not going to save. Don't worry, tech guy. And then I could just drag it right into my music folder or my iTunes or whatever. That is actually not responding. My contact information would have been on the last slide, but that's all I have for you. Very effective in her time management and we have time for questions directly. Any questions? Just very simply about how many musicians and groups do you think that you touched with? Ah, there we go. We currently have 95 albums and about 70 to 75 different musical performers, groups or individuals. I'm just curious why you decided on a two year contract knowing that you've got to go through that cycle every two years to rework with the musicians. Well, I did want to pretty frequently refresh the collection and kind of aggressively build it. Other than that, that's what Iowa City was doing. Do you have mark records for the content in your own catalog? Or is it completely a separate ecosystem? Oh, not yet, but we are going to be adding the mark records. When we launched this project, we were still using Evergreen, so we really just wanted to wait. Two questions. How much usage is it getting so far? And I noticed you're partnering with SoundCloud. Do you have a backup plan as SoundCloud goes away? Well, if SoundCloud goes away, it is actually possible now to use Omeka itself. Just dream the music, which was, I guess, the most recent update to the Omeka software. It just doesn't look as pretty and awesome, so that's my plan. And I'm sorry, you're going to have to remind me the first part. Well, when the project first went live, we got like 500,000 page views. We're getting about, you know, close to 1,000 page views a month, and that's just page views. We've only just begun getting download statistics out of the system. So I don't know if it's that everybody and their brother in the entire community downloaded everything, and then now that's it, they're done, which is entirely possible. But we're only, we're getting about 10 to 20 download sessions per week in the last three weeks since I've been getting statistics. Diane, are you actively trying to recruit new artists into the database, or do they approach you? Are you having to turn people away, or how does that work? I am actively trying to recruit musicians. You know, I try to get out there as much as I can. And also, musicians come to me when they learn about it. I have been lucky in that we are able to use some local history funding for this. You know, just a small budget each year to keep outing musicians. I was just curious, sorry to bring up data entry, because it was going to make you cry. But when you said we, who's we, was it all library staff, or do you have a failings of volunteers to help with this? I had, well of course, we have one person on staff who's like the de facto original cataloger. And so she did all of the cataloging of the physical CDs. I have an aide who for three or six hours a week came in and did most of the grant work. And I also had a volunteer who came in for three to six hours a week to do a lot of that grant work. You know, and see the thing is, by using SoundCloud, it would have been nice to have SoundCloud handle the downloading as well as the streaming, but we couldn't do that and keep the authentication. So we had to enter metadata on every song in like four places. It was like out of control. Well, I didn't. I think we have time for one more question. And I see one over here. Did you do some sort of event or kickoff to let the community know about this? Or did everybody kind of know about it already? You know, I really wanted to do some kind of kickoff, but the timing was just, we just did not have the resources to do it at the time that we finally went live a year late. But you know, I'm still hoping to do. I mean, there's nothing that says that we can't do an event. And I think it's a great way to get more musicians involved and it's a great way to get the community involved. You know, my partner in crime at the Santa Cruz rehearsal studios, she did a lot of the outreach work in notifying people about it and getting the musical community to know. And then of course we did our press releases and things like that. And then we do have the physical collection of CDs like really prominently displayed at the downtown library. So people can find out visually that there's this local music collection and then it also points you to the online resource. Thank you, Diane.