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The Music Library is a multimedia library. Its collection contains 120,000 volumes of printed material
(books, periodicals, and printed music), about 45,000 long-playing records, almost 5,000 CDs, about 500
videos in three different formats (VHS, Beta, and videodisc), and a collection of 1,500 microfilms of
source materials. All of this material is housed in Lincoln Hall, a building built originally for civil
engineering, and never designed to house a library of this magnitude or weight. If you own any long
playing records you can perhaps imagine what a collection of our size must weigh.
A music library at an institution like Cornell serves many different people. Neal Zaslaw's work on the new Kochel catalogue draws upon this collection every day. But his colleagues who are performers also are regular users: they may borrow editions of the music; examine reproductions of manuscripts or early editions that were published during the composer's lifetime and thus, we hope, accurately reflect the composer's instructions for performing a work; or they may come to listen to recordings of other performers. All of these needs are amply met in our collection. We also must keep track of the changing interest in new compositions - music that fuels the muse of our composers and their students - not to mention jazz, many genres of popular music and music from cultures around the world.
I don't want to leave you with the impression that this collection only serves the members of the music department, however. The faculty member in the Ag School looking for the name of Spike Jones's mule, Feetle Baum; the professor of German literature who seeks the Japanese songs that informed Puccini's composition of Madama Butterfly; the architecture student who inquires whether the form of the piano factory follows the function; the entomologist seeking musical references to insects; or the people preparing to go off to see operas they've never seen before-we meet and help this great variety of users.
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One chooses to become a music librarian because of a deep and abiding love of music and an interest in
sharing that love with others. This concept of service requires a kind of intimate knowledge of the field of
music and at the same time the willingness to admit you don't know about some aspect of the discipline.
What those of us on the music library staff do know is how to use the tools that can give us access to the
answers to the questions that you ask of us.
This article is Copyright © 1996 Lenore Coral. All Rights Reserved.