 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended by it. Where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We have a variety of library topics and activities on the show. Interviews, mini-training sessions, demos, basically anything library related, we are happy and want to have it on the show. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. Both the live show here and our archives that are available on our website. We do the live show every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that is okay. You can always go to our website, as I said, and see the recordings of all our shows going back to the very beginning, which was January 2009 when we started. So, yeah, we're in the start of our sixth year of doing this. Do the math, it's a long time. So, we have the Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes come on and do shows, and we do bringing guest speakers as we have this morning. And sitting next to me is Caroline Dow, who's from just down the street. She walked up through the snow this morning from Lincoln City Libraries and the Poly Music Library there. And she's going to share with us what the library is all about, what it does, and about music librarianship in general and what she's doing there at the library. So, I will hand over to you, Caroline, take it away. Thank you, Christa. It's really my pleasure to be here. I feel like I have the most perfect job for me. I can't imagine doing anything else. I love being a music librarian. And so, it's going to be fun for me to share a little bit about music libraries and music librarianship and especially international music librarianship and my activities. I know that was one of the things that caught our attention was that part of the conference that you went to that I know you're going to talk about in a bit. Before I get started on the slides and talking about the Poly Music Library specifically, I dug up a definition of music librarianship from the music librarianship, music library association, which is the American library organization for music librarians. What is a music librarian? A music librarian is a librarian qualified to specialize in music. A broad musical background is essential for music in any style, and the medium or era can find a place in a library. Aptitude and training in both music and librarianship are necessary. And what do music librarians do? The traditional responsibilities of librarians are at the heart of most music librarians' activities. I'm a librarian, but I get to deal in music, which is really fun. The Poly Music Library is a public music library. That means it's basically a music department in a public library. Most public libraries have music in their collections, but have a section or they at least have a few song books. They have some books about composer biographies. We have some CDs, but the Poly Music Library is all music. It's a fairly small collection being somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 cataloged books and scores. And then, of course, there are the CDs. We also have archival collections. We have music magazines. In fact, if you look in this slide, you can see just on that book truck at the bottom left, there's some CDs, there's books, there's a score. Just a little bit of everything. A whole mish-mash of formats. Poly's been around for a while, and so the slides that I found are going to vary. And so I did try to at least date them as best as I could. The blue shelves are the same from the beginning. And we're pretty full, which means like public libraries, we have to weed. Many music libraries and academic institutions don't necessarily weed or they remove things to off-site storage. Lillian Helms Polly left her estate and trust for a music library for the citizens of Lincoln. She lived a very long life. She taught music both at the university and privately and had no children. And we're very fortunate that she left the funds to allow us to have a music library, which means Polly is not tax-supported even though we are in the public library. So it still is keeping it going. We are funded from the endowment and another music teacher in town a couple years ago established another fund, another endowment through the library foundation. So we have... I don't think that's actually generating money that we can use yet, but for the future. Lillian also had basically paid for the space where the Polly music library is. She provided the matching funds for an LSCA grant that paid for an expansion of Bennett Martin Public Library before the music library was established by quite a few years. But she got her space in the library. I was hired in 1981 to create the new Polly music library. It was the first public music library established in the U.S. in about 20 years. And so it was something very special. We wouldn't have it without Lillian Polly. But it was fun to create the library and had to start with getting a few materials and then shelving and even that card catalog back in that picture. That shows a little variety of the types of scores that we had. We have chamber music, we have solo music, piano, vocal scores. We actually have a sheet music collection that has been built entirely through donations. It's basically popular sheet music sheets. Over 12,000 titles. And it is now considered a research quality collection. And that's part of archival materials. And it's not catalogued. 1982, when we opened to the public, we had stacks. They had books on them. There was still a little bit of space. By 1993, there was no space. And from about then on, we had to get it. We had to start reading just to make sure that we had room for new materials. In that slide, you can see, we had a computer system. In 1987, yes. We had the one I started in libraries. Yeah. We went online in 1987. And there's that clunky monitor, dumb terminal. It worked. But it worked. We had magazines. And if you look past the fire doors, you can see LP records. Those are actually coming back. Yeah, they are. Those are selling everything you can get and buy turntables in places like Best Buy, yes. And in the foreground, you can see a display case that has sheet music in it. That's one of the things that we use it for, displays to promote poly, get people seeing things, songs that they remember, and get them into the collection. Oh, that's good. We had traditional magazine shelving. But we needed that space for books. So we've been trying a variety of things. And now we just simply have magazines and a plexiglass rack, several titles to a slot. People have to hunt. But we have the magazines. And they find for about 25 years or so. We had a reference desk. You can see staff there at the desk. But I blew up the reference desk. I actually attended the program session that was held about doing other things and not being confined by the desk. And I think it was called blowing up the reference desk. And that kiosk works beautifully. I can bring customers around to show them what's on the screen. And I'm not just simply seated at a desk. I can move throughout the collection. I can work on cataloging in my office and step out to be with the customers. Makes it much more open and welcoming, I think. And more interactive. And it takes so much less space. Yeah, we need the space, definitely. We are fortunate that we're still able to buy materials. Our budget is based off of the income from the trust. And it varies. But we've been able to continue to purchase new materials. And that's critical for any library. One of the neat things that we have is that MIDI keyboard. And we have Finale on that computer. That computer actually gets used primarily as a CD listening station. But we do have the software on it. And people can sit down and notate what the music in their head would work on arrangements. That sort of transitions to some of our online services. We've had our Poly Music Library web page for more than a decade. It's definitely time that we rework it. But it's there. It works. It gets customers to where they can find our online resources. One of which is that Musicable Nebraska. Poly was very fortunate from 2004, 2005, and 2006 to have digitization grants through LSTA and the Nebraska Library Commission. The first one was the Musicable Nebraska project. And we do have a display of those materials on our website, annotated author catalog thumbnails. We even have some lesson plans, historical background for the pieces. Those pieces are also in Nebraska Memories. And the materials from our other digitization projects are also in Nebraska Memories. We do have access to streaming music for our customers through Alexander Street Press' music online databases. And it's available several places through the Poly website, right? Lincoln City Library's list of databases. So anybody with a Lincoln City Library's card can access these from home. It is streaming, not downloadable. I put out an irregular newsletter of often new titles of things that I've added. Sometimes I do topical book lists. And they're available through an email book list that people can sign up for. And they're also on the Poly page. And there was an icon down at the bottom. And they're available through the Lincoln City Library's books, music, and more book lists pages. And thanks to a donation from the Musical Art Club of Lincoln, we, Poly, is now buying some music downloadable ebooks. And they're accessible through the Lincoln City Library's pages. And of course, we have a link on the Poly page. Probably the thing we're best known for other than our collection is the specialized music reference and research services. We help customers from all over the, actually all over the world with their music information needs. Just last week, I helped a customer who needed information about someone who was in the Music of Old Nebraska project. And I was able to get him that, but then I went and did further research and answered back. That was just, just exactly what he was looking for. I've had helped customers look for music that might have been used at a wedding in the Oregon Territory in the 1840s. Oh, wow. We have some old hymnals. And I was able to find a hymnal from the 1840s of a denomination that would have been in the Oregon Territory and found a wedding hymn. And one of the fun questions, a little strange was about the death of a metropolitan opera tenor when he was in Lincoln. Supposedly going to perform with a touring, the first touring company after the Second World War. They were doing Flater Mouse in English and it was going to be at the, I believe at the University Coliseum, but he died before the performance. And there's a researcher researching that whole tour and she, because the lead tenor died in Lincoln, she did contact me to see if I had any information. And I was able to come up with some. And the, it was interesting to see that the death had been withheld until after the performance. And so one of the papers in town was, why did they withhold this information? Was it just to notify his wife? They want people to still come to the perform. And was it a cover-up? It's just as calm or actually more common for people to come in looking for song lyrics, looking for the third and fourth verses in German of Silent Night at Christmas time. And various pieces in specific arrangements, specific keys, but it runs the whole gamut of things. And some of them do actually, or a lot of them do take a knowledge of music to be able to assist the customer. When we were founded, we knew we were going to be a statewide resource and actually a regional resource. So how can we serve you? Probably the most common way would be through interlibrary loan of our music materials. If you happen to be in the Pioneer Consortium, you can probably just see in the catalog what we have, get an OCLC number and go order it. Otherwise, you can contact us to see if we have something or find it through OCLC. I'm really happy to help with reference assistance and some libraries have sent questions to me. And I'm usually able to answer or at least point in the right direction. We can help with locating music materials to meet your customer's needs. They might not be in polyp. They might be someplace else. There might be a digital copy of something online that will serve your customer's needs that it just takes the right way of searching or a different way of searching to find. I was able to locate a song in a specific key for a customer embedded in a library catalog in Australia. And I knew to look because of my involvement in YAML, that I'd heard about their digitization projects. So that's coming up. But you never know where you're going to find things these days. And a lot of stuff is online, but it's where you look and how you look. And maybe the thing online isn't what you need. You need a paper copy. And we also help the state through on the best memories participation, I think. Definitely keep building that collection up for anything in the state on all topics. And that Nebraska Memories actually has a nice range of archival materials in them. At least browsing through the collections there show the types of items we have anyway. If you're looking for pictures of the Lincoln Boys Choir, you'll find it. Some historical programs. In case anyone is wondering, we've been talking about the Poly website, the web page in Nebraska Memories. All the links that are being mentioned during the show will be available in the show notes afterwards. I've been putting them into our delicious account, so we'll be able to have a quick link to them afterwards. Thank you. Actually, let's go back one. One thing I don't have slide for is the future of Poly. And as Lincoln is discussing a new lean library, I want to reassure our listeners that Poly will have a place in any new lean library. In fact, we may have the opportunities for new services or getting into the 21st century. I think we're doing a decent job, but we may be able to do it better. There's always something you can do different. So, Poly will be in the new lean library. Even when? Yes. Don't hold your breath. We don't know what's happening. But because that is being discussed in the library community. Well, the community of Lincoln at large. The trust that Lillian set up will keep it going. Even though Lillian created the space word, the music library is not tied to that space, specifically. Just somewhere that needs to be used for it. In music librarianship, there are two major music library associations, at least from the American view. There is the Music Library Association, which is the American organization. It was founded in 1931, four years early in my career. I was very active in the Music Library Association. And I'm still a member. I'll be attending the conference later this month. But I'm no longer as active as I used to be. Because my focus, oh, 20 years ago, shifted to the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centers, or YAML for short. It's a member of IFWA and the International Music Council and a whole bunch of other organizations. There used to be a YAML-US, which was the American branch. Except three or four years ago, it merged with the Music Library Association. So now the Music Library Association is the American branch of YAML. That makes sense. And almost all the members of YAML-US were members of the Music Library Association. There's just a smaller group with an international focus. I was invited to my first YAML conference in Ottawa, Canada, 1994, so 20 years ago, to present a paper on the Poly Music Library in a session on North American Public Music Libraries. Trying to show the variety that there was in organization collections and what they do. I loved it. It was so much fun. And I felt so welcomed. Before I got registered, I was walking from the hotel to the university where I was going to register. And the YAML president stopped me on the street, welcomed me to YAML, said how wonderful he thought that I could come and hoped that I would have a wonderful conference. I mean, how many conferences does that happen? You know, maybe we need to do that for a conference and make sure everybody's welcomed. Anyway, Ottawa, my paper went very, very well. And I decided, yeah, I had a good time in Ottawa, and it was close enough that I could afford to go. But the next year was going to be in Elton, Denmark. Yeah, it was way easier to get to from here. And that little slide, little picture from Elton, is Hamlet's Castle. I decided that I had such a good conference in Ottawa, I would try going to Denmark. I had a wonderful conference there, too. And again, I felt very welcomed. People from the national libraries were willing to talk to me. And, you know, nobody was out of, above where they would talk to other people. Yeah, it was such a welcoming, friendly organization. And I learned so much that I decided I'd go the next year. And were you presenting all the time? I presented in Ottawa, and then I presented again in Perugio. I'm over on the right. I would have to say I did a very forgettable paper there. But it also was a wonderful conference, and I learned so much. And not only they had been welcoming before, but in 1996 I was elected Secretary of the Public Libraries very much, or YAML. So then I had to go to the next several. So I was hooked on YAML. You'll see that the United States hosted in 2002. And I was registered for that conference, and I was planning, and as a YAML U.S. board member and a board member for the YAML Public Libraries Branch, I had a lot of responsibilities for that. But I ended up getting sick and couldn't go with the last minute. That's why it's in prison. But I went pretty steadily from 1994 to 2005, skipped a year. And in Sydney, we met at the Sydney Conservatorium. I presented a paper on Polly's digitization projects. And that went fabulous. And every digitization project that somebody presents a paper on is another possible resource when we go to help our customers. You find out that they have something there that we made answer someone's question here. But 2007, the economy does play a role. And YAML was one of those organizations where I then missed a few years. And they welcomed me back as if I hadn't ever been gone. So in Dublin, 2011, we were at Trinity College. And I presented a paper on Tim Pan Ailey Irish music from the Polly sheet music collection. And so it was basically a research paper built around sheet music in the Polly collection. And again, it went fabulously. And I was really glad I went. Again, it was a fantastic conference. And I learned so much. Okay, it's in Montreal the next year. North America again, easier to get to. And in Montreal, I was elected chair of the YAML Public Libraries Branch. So even though I'd been gone a few years and just come back with... You can stay involved and connect with people as you met them from before. And enough other people because of the world economic crises during the years I was gone had also been gone. And so YAML is an organization where you can come and go. How big is the conference? How many people attend? The lowest number was 99 in Wellington, New Zealand. But it usually is 300 to 400. Nice, not bad. So a nice size conference. Last year was Vienna. That happens to be the Musikverein. We had our conference sessions at the University of Vienna. But we had our concert. One of our concerts was at the Musikverein. And the other one was at a concert hall in Schoenbrunn Palace. Again, just fabulous conference. One of the neat things about the YAML conferences is that we have library visits. Visits to all sorts of libraries. In Vienna, the Vienna City Library in the Rathauser City Hall is a research library. But they also have the public library, which this is the branch that has the major music collection anyway. It's on top of a subway station. And on the rooftop is a cafe. And several floors of library. But just simply seeing how other people are doing the same, basically the same things that we're trying to do can give one ideas. And YAML is also good for discussing issues. That if you're having an issue, probably somebody else is having that same issue. However, in Copenhagen, I haven't heard of any other library where the whole of the audio visual collection was stolen one night. Oh, wow. And they believe that it was probably taken out to sea immediately and gone. There's no way to prepare for something like that. But I mean, that certainly got us talking about theft of collections and collection security. Yeah, that's crazy. And that's not always a topic. A little here and there, you know, one thing about something will go missing, but not an entire collection, yeah. A typical YAML conference day doesn't officially start until nine o'clock in the morning. But sometimes there are breakfast meetings, but there's papers, then there's a coffee break in exhibits, more papers, and there's working meetings. There's lunch and committee meetings, papers, coffee break and exhibits, papers or library visits, and then concerts or receptions. So it's a full day. And at a reception, very likely it's going to be some place where they're going to give you a tour. Right. So if it's... Very common to many library conferences, except we get the concerts. Yeah. That's some cool things to be specific to this. What I've done in YAML, I've of course attended a whole bunch of conferences. I've done some papers. I've been an officer. I've been on committees. And right now I'm involved in an informal social media policy discussion group. And I'm learning so much just from the discussions that we're having. And it's being done via a Wiki. Probably the first thing you have to do to be involved is show up. But in every library organization that I'm a part of, they're looking for people to do things. Always. And if you have an interest, say so. I've had so much fun in YAML. And I've met so many people. I've used my contacts in a variety of ways. Library issues around the world really are pretty much the same. But I've certainly gotten an appreciation for our situation here that we do have funding. Not everybody. I mean, even when we lose funding, our situation is not anywhere near as dire as in many parts of the world. And that's probably lucky that way, yeah. And a chance to see and hear about how other libraries do things. And then reference assistance for my own customers. There was a question I got about a Swiss dialect folks on. I certainly couldn't provide an accurate translation at that point. I really didn't have any idea of how to go about finding information. I mean, I tried the Internet. This was several years ago. But there was a colleague in Switzerland. And I was able to forward the question to the colleague in Switzerland via email. And he was able to provide all the information that the customer needed in a fairly timely fashion. It's pretty easy to contact Polly on the department's email address is Polly at LincolnLibraries.org. There's the telephone number. We get mail. And you can even like us on Facebook. Yep, I have already. Look at that. I couldn't remember. Oh, why don't you go back and put the, yeah, leave that up for now. Oh, thank you. I do. I did have some questions that came in. Oh, yeah. So we can definitely go to those. That was very interesting. Here in Lincoln, we always hear about the Polly Music Library. It's something, you know, obviously we're hearing the library donations with Nebraska memories. We're talking about it. But don't always know what it's all about, what it's music. But the specifics of what kind of things are there. We always know, like you're saying, looking up, what does a music librarian do? What's it all about? So questions we have to have come in mainly about actually Polly's collection. What you guys do here. Okay. That some about the software that you had. You had the finale finale. How often are you able to update it? Does it have regular? We actually have not updated finale since we put it on that machine. Okay. It is something that we will probably available. I don't know how often it is. It really doesn't get updated terribly often every couple of years. But it's the version that we have, I believe, is the version that they use at LPS. Okay. So the students that are coming to the library, they have the same thing to work with. That makes sense. And it's interesting. Have you used anything like query by humming programs to help patrons? Apparently, programs that someone can hum a tune and see if it, is that something that's ever been. No, we do have the whole time that Polly has been in existence. We have had named this tune. Questions. Of course. Yes. I haven't used any of the online humming queries. There are a few programs, and there's been a little bit of discussion of them about how accurate they are. One of the things, one of the ways that we can help customers, if we can't figure it out ourselves, is to put it on one of the Music Library Association mailing lists. Like MLAL. And we would simply go ahead and then notate what we had heard with names of the notes. And does anybody else recognize it? Yeah. Question. Have you had any copyright issues? What kinds of copyright issues have you come across in your reference work? I'm not sure what they mean with copying the music or recordings or anything like that. I'd say most of the use that people have made of the collection would fall under fair use. Occasionally, if someone wanted to make emptying copies of something to perform it in their choir, we'd probably step in and say this may be under copyright. So you're aware of what you're doing, though we aren't trying to be the copyright police. We can just warn them and say you might not want to be doing that. There's other ways to get that same thing. That virtually everything that we have checks out. And so they don't necessarily have to be copying it in the library. Right. You don't know what they're doing. We don't know with it. And that's not anything we can do anything about. Anyways, yeah. We have no idea. And we have books on music copyright and music licensing. So if people are interested and want to delve into it further, we have material available because we also are not lawyers. No, that's a key thing. A lot of librarians about any topic. I can give you some information and stuff, but no, we are not lawyers and we're not going to pretend that we can give you that. And so simply saying it may be under copyright. It appears. But we can't even necessarily give a definitive answer on that. Right. There's a copyright notice down on that page. Right. And you can tell them here's how you might want to figure this out for yourself where you might want to go to research and see what the status is of this particular item. Yeah. And we've had authors who wanted, who come to us to see if they can track down who they would get permission from to use a quote. And so we'll go track, try to track down publishers and tracing publishing companies can be a little tricky. But at least if they've got, if someone's gotten to that stage, they do know that they usually know that they need to get permission. And the last question we have is actually I was wondering about two and you mentioned it. You said that your sheet music collection is not cataloged. Certainly not in the catalog. So how do you find what people need? How do you get through it? It is in an access database. It actually was started in an R-based database, which was a relational database way back when. And there's a variety of ways of searching to find things. But if we probably verify the title first before we start looking. So that's an, that's just an in-house thing. So somebody wanted to search that they'd have to either come to the library or contact you. It's not connected to the online catalog. It's not collected to the media. Is that just too much to try and get into there? I'd say the clock. The catalog may be built for it. Everything could be cataloged. But it takes staff time. Staff time takes money. And it's not a priority. So we thought of going for grant. In fact, we had tried getting a grant. I don't know how many years ago, but we didn't get the grant and it would have taken a tremendous amount of time to get, if you're cataloging 12,000 titles. Yeah, that's a huge project. It's a huge project. And I don't know if somebody is doing that as their only job. That's going to take a long time. Yeah. How many other staff either that are specifically for the poly? Is it just you or who you have? At this point, it's just me. Oh, okay. Throughout the history of poly, the number of staff has varied anywhere from, well, one me. Two to five people basically for the first 25 years. Okay. That's all we had that came in while you were talking that I saved up. If anybody does have any other questions or comments or anything you want to share, go ahead and type them into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. We can grab them. We still have like 10 minutes left. Is there anything else that you wanted to always see if anybody has anything else coming in? Well, the upcoming animal conference is in Antwerp. And you're going? Yes, I will be going. I have program sessions to run and committee meetings. Right. Well, you're the chair of the US Public Library branch. And the year after that is in New York. Oh, nice. So that will actually provide an opportunity for some American music library. It's a lot more to look into it. Yeah. It is going to jump all over the world, which is nice being international that they are really sticking to that. We will go anywhere and have this conference will be anywhere we possibly can. And the attendance is usually fairly heavily with people, the librarians from that general area. It might not be just that country, but it might be surrounding countries, right? But people attend oftentimes their first normal conference is fairly nearby. And then if they get hooked, yeah, they are willing to go a little farther. I do want to say that I do. It's privately funded. And so I'm not using tax funds. I am not using library funds for attendance. That's good, you know, some people are doing. Yeah. Do you have any like special events or anything coming up that Polly's doing? Do you like programs and things? We occasionally do programs that I don't have anything lined up this spring. There's lots of things going on at the library. There's also a lot of musical performances that are sponsored by it for the youth. And a lot of them are certainly appropriate for all age. Oh yeah. Taiko drummers. They're, yeah, they are advertised to the teen or the children. But I know a lot of parents go along because they want to see it too. All right. Well, it doesn't look like any other urgent questions have come in while we've been talking. So I guess that would be, nobody has anything else I needed to ask you about on here, but they have your contact information. So obviously if they do anything else you want to ask, that's how you can contact Carolyn or anything about the Polly itself or what you're doing with the international library groups and the other library. Anything else you want to say to wrap up or just thank you for coming and listening. Yeah. This is one of our staff here at the commission that suggested that we get you guys have you on the show to share what's going on over there. So I'm glad they did. And I'm glad we're able to get you here, especially on this snowy day that we just had. I know lots of other areas in the country are way worse than we are today. But we did have a storm last night and street cleaning is still progressing, but we both made it downtown to like a city's and here's mission. So we were able to do this, not a problem. So thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for coming in this morning. The show is being recorded, so it'll be available afterwards if you want to watch it later. I've got Carolyn's slides, too. So the slides will be available. You'll have all those pictures and things and the places you went. And any of the websites that were mentioned, the Polly Library, the Music Associations, their Facebook page, I've been collecting all of those. So you'll have access. You'll have those as well afterwards to quickly be able to access and look up. So that we will wrap it up for this morning at our Encompass Live page. And the archive when the recording is done, it will be on our page right down here below all of our upcoming sessions. We have a link to our archive and Encompass Live sessions. So you can go there and it will bring you the recordings of all of our previous shows are here. So that's where you'll be able to watch that or watch anything that you may have missed. And I'll hopefully join us next week when our topic is succession planning, a board and staff responsibility. Jamie LaRue, who's formerly with the Douglas County Colorado Libraries, who's a director there and just the end of last year. Left there is going on his own, his own consulting group that he's doing. So he's going to be on talking about succession planning when you need to bring in a new director. Something you think about before it happens, not after it's happened and figure out what you want to do. So definitely sign up for that episode and any of other future ones we have on our calendar. We have quite a few topics coming up in the next couple of months. Hastings Public Library has Google Glass, that's what that one is about, password management and security. All these credit card things going on, definitely an important topic. Our regular summer reading program session, Sally Snyder is our children's and young adult coordinator here. She'll be doing a session on what's coming up for that. So definitely take a look at our different episodes, sign up for them. And Encompass Live is also on Facebook, facebook.com. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do like us on there. You'll get notifications of when new shows are coming up and recordings are available. Reminders when today's show is starting so that you could join us as well. So like us on there, if you are a Facebook user, look for us. Look for Poly Music Library. And then that will wrap it up for this morning. Thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time. Thank you.