Service and Training

Given that much of our sessions in Montreal last year was given over to the subject of Training, it was appropriate that several presentations given this year in Vienna swung back in the direction of the Service part of our remit. As usual, two sessions were organised by the Commission. Session 1--Using music services for education--29 July It was a pleasure to welcome back Keith Cochran, who gave a presentation at the Montreal conference. For his paper Integrating Research Skills into the Undergraduate Curriculum he was joined by his colleague from Indiana University's William and Gayle Cook Music Library, Carla Williams. All undergraduate programmes contain a module in information training, emphasising shared skills and common goals, as well as the ethical use of information. In adapting this for music students, Keith chose to introduce information tools as part of classes spread across the curriculum as the most productive use of staff time. He has also wisely taken as his staring point consideration of the tools and skills which students would need consistently throughout their course. Consequently the introduction of information resources moves from the general to the more specialised, not least so as to emphasise the importance of transferable skills. programme, devised in 2010, is currently running for the first time. On completion it will be reassessed, but the response to date has been positive. The Role and Place of the Library of the Music University in the Context of Integration of Russian Higher Education in the Global Education Universe, a paper by Emilia Rassina of the S. I. Taneev Research Music Library at the Moscow Conservatoire, was read by John Wagstaff. Emilia gave an overview of how the training of Russian music students has traditionally developed since the inception of the conservatoire system in the mid-19th century. cultural and political changes experienced by post-Soviet Russia and the establishment of the Bologna Process have all impacted on this long-standing Russian pedagogic system and by extension on the libraries of music-teaching institutions. Using the example of the Taneev Research Library, Emilia explained how developments at administrative and institutional level have led to tighter coordination of standards and processes, expansion and better promotion of library resources, and greater cooperation between libraries both within and outside Russia. Becky Smith obtained her first professional post at the Memorial University of Newfoundland at St. John's in 2011, where she found herself straight away having to devise information skills training before she had had a chance to familiarise herself with the collections and resources available. Her paper Teaching to Learn and Learning your Collection outlined the steep learning curve which she experienced. One of her tasks was to impose some consistency on the varied processes initiated by her predecessors. Given the limited time available, she was constrained to work with pre-existing course material and textbooks, together with her own now slightly out of date library school training. She also found that external models devised for much larger libraries did not necessarily work for her own collections. Although faced with a daunting task, she was able to use the experience to become familiar with these collections, to identify gaps in stock and inconsistencies in cataloguing. In devising a teaching plan she also came to realise the wisdom of not trying to cover everything at once, but to develop a plan which could function as a basis on which to build in future. …

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