THE MUSICAL INFORMATION SERVICES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
| Pages | 1-12 |
| Published date | 01 January 1957 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026239 |
| Date | 01 January 1957 |
| Author | A. HYATT KING |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Journal
of
DOCUMENTATION
Volume
13
MARCH
1957 Number 1
THE
MUSICAL INFORMATION SERVICES
OF
THE BRITISH MUSEUM1
by A.
HYATT
KING
Superintendent
of
the
Music
Room
of
the
British
Museum,
President
of the
International Association
of
Music
Libraries
ONE
afternoon, about twelve years ago, the telephone rang, and a strange
voice said: 'Hold on! I'm going to put on a gramophone record near the
'phone and I want you to listen and tell me what the tunes
are:
it's a potpourri
of Johann Strauss waltzes.' I fear I wasn't able to identify many of the tunes,
and
I
only mention the episode
as
having been one of my earliest and certainly
my most vividly remembered introduction to a practical aspect of the subject
of this paper. Thirty years ago, these services as we know them today hardly
existed. In any library, information services must depend very largely on
catalogues and the way in which they have been compiled: so I propose to
base most of my remarks on an outline of the growth of the British Museum's
catalogues that bear on music, and to link this with an account of the kind of
information we are asked for, and to show how we have tried to build up our
knowledge in general and the catalogues in particular to meet this demand.
I shall not say anything about the kind of information that can be provided
simply by consulting
Grove
and other standard works of musical reference.
I also want to try to show how 'information', widely interpreted in a well-
balanced national collection of
music,
could bring it to life in a novel way
with immense
possibilities.
Finally, by way of introduction, I must emphasize
that I am concerned solely with the Music Room, which forms a division of
the Department of Printed
Books.
Information regarding the large collection
of manuscript music which is in the Department of Manuscripts is the con-
cern solely of that Department. But
I
may mention here that the Music Room
does contain a good deal of manuscript material which forms an inseparable
part of special collections such as the Queen's Music Library, the Hirsch
Library, and the Library of the Madrigal Society. For information about these
manuscripts the Music Room staff
are
responsible.
The realization of the need for a separate catalogue of music appears to have
1
Read to a joint meeting of Aslib and the United Kingdom Branch of the International
Association of Music Libraries on 30 Nov. 1956.
B
1
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