By Marci Cohen, Head, Music Library, Boston University Libraries (retired)

As a first-time attendee at this year’s Charleston Conference and a first-time visitor to Charleston, I was interested in what the conference and the city had to offer  for music libraries, institutions that support music studies, and attendees interested in music. The short answer: there was plenty.

First up was the Vendor Showcase. All the big players were represented. Harrassowitz may be broadly known for their acquisitions and collection development support services, but they also specialize in supplying music scores, including standing orders for score series, the M2 and M3 “monuments” that provide the backbone of music collections, and customized approval plans. Taylor & Francis were promoting new interdisciplinary curated collections in world music and nine other fields. Clarivate, parent company of ProQuest, was moving past the fallout from their poorly-received announcement that they were phasing out sales of one-time perpetual licenses for theirs eBooks. They focused on their simplified subscription packages and pricing, including ProQuest One Performing Arts. Bloomsbury continues to go deep on music. More niche, medici.tv focuses on recorded and live video of classical music, opera, dance, and jazz.

Among the university presses, of course Oxford and Cambridge have music titles since they publish in nearly every discipline. On the smaller front, Duke was promoting a music and sound studies eBook collection covering domestic music creation as well as locales like Ghana and South Africa. The university presses for Manchester and Liverpool have popular music offerings reflecting their scenes. It’s remarkable that these northern cities just 35 miles apart have such distinct musical identities. Liverpool’s most famous sons were part of the broader Merseybeat genre, and the city's music heritage continued into the ‘80s with bands such as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Echo & the Bunnymen. Manchester, meanwhile, was a key location for punk, post-punk, and dance music culture, spawning Buzzcocks, Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Stone Roses, among others, as well as Britpop paragons Oasis. Liverpool University Press are trying to attract scholarly submissions for their Journal of Beatles Studies. Manchester University Press has launched a book collection on popular music studies that made me want to clear my calendar so that I could take advantage of a free trial and read all of them, especially titles on Joe Strummer and the Clash and a history of goth by noted music journalist John Robb.

Among the program sessions, two stood out regarding music. For libraries that support music business studies but don’t have the resources of a full MBA program, Ryan Phillips of Baruch College had a useful poster that he hopes to turn into an article, “Security and Company identifiers for Business Research.” He documented roughly a dozen company identifiers, from DUNS numbers that cover both public and privately-held businesses to the widely-used New York Stock Exchange ticker symbols, that can be used in a variety of databases for company research. These identifiers serve as a form of authority control for businesses of varying sizes, just as opus or Köchel numbers provide authority control for musical works. Bloomberg terminals go deep on financial data when conducting business research, but they exclude remote access, place limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded, and may be prohibitively expensive. Other business databases that are easier to access and more affordable duplicate some of the information found in Bloomberg, such as Gale’s Business Insights, which, for example, had been free to all Massachusetts libraries. These identifiers make it easy to differentiate companies with similar names and to locate press releases, business news, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and other data such as estimated income, all of which are beneficial when conducting research on music-related companies. Grover Baker and I discussed this in “Takin’ Care of Business: Music Business Reference” in Music Reference Services Quarterly.

“How Can We Measure Humanities Research Impact in the Library and Beyond?” a panel moderated by Jacqui Gilchrist, Gale’s Senior Director, Marketing, was notably relevant for both the questions it raised and the answers it provided. They started from the recognition that the humanities have impacts that are different from the sciences and traditional bibliometrics. The humanities also need different timeframes and means to measure, especially real world impact, not just academic impact. It can be in white papers and gray literature and in mentions rather than formal citations, all of which are harder to measure and should therefore be reflected in university policies for tenure and promotion. Willa Liburd Tavernier, Research Impact & Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University, noted that the humanities rely on books, performances, and community engagement, while bibliometrics databases’ strength is in articles, especially those in STEM fields. She mentioned systems for measuring humanities impact and emphasized that no one system/database can provide all the answers, pointed out the importance of using multiple ways of measuring value, not just impact. Holly Yu, Head of Collections, Discovery, and Content Management, Cal State Los Angeles, is looking into the impact of music on the science of well-being. Evan Simpson, Associate Dean, Experiential Learning and Academic Engagement, Northeastern University Library, is looking informally rather than systematically at citations in gray literature, gravitating towards telling stories because systematic discovery is so difficult. He noted that Northeastern is centered on experiential learning, but it’s hard to measure experience; libraries can measure inputs more easily than outputs. He urged pushing for greater coverage of humanities, not just in bibliometric databases but also for read & publish agreements, a sentiment echoed in the recent Katina article “For Researchers in the Humanities, Is Open Really Fair?” He also pointed out Northeastern’s larger impact on Boston. When the city government asks, “What good are you providing for the broader community?” he said the arts are often the answer.

Jeremy Katz, Research Impact Librarian, Florida State University, had the best responses on what can be done right now. Focusing on FSU’s College of Music, he is using ArcGIS StoryMaps to show their impact, mapping performances and where their alumni are teaching. This involves talking to the college’s marketing and travel departments to find out where faculty and students are going. He’s hoping for better tracking of media mentions, altmetrics, and interdisciplinary tracking to demonstrate community and broader impact.

Before heading to Charleston, I did check Songkick, my favorite website for finding out-of-town concert listings, but nothing was enough of a draw to lure me away from evening conference activities despite the convenience of some local stages. The Charleston Music Hall was steps from my hotel, and I spent plenty of time at the Gaillard Center attending conference events if not musical ones. However, I did take time to browse through Record Stop. As their sign noted, the record store was established in 1974 and had new and used vinyl across genres. Meanwhile, the band at the conference reception at the South Carolina Aquarium could bring out the dance moves even in someone with two left feet; I suspect that even the fish and the frogs were dancing. I also got to enjoy discussing music with old and new friends while lingering over drinks, one of my second favorite pastimes after listening to music.