Kirstin Dougan’s research while affiliated with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and other places

The current environment of video sharing sites like YouTube, and direct-to-consumer digital music distribution models, presents challenges to academic music libraries’ primary mission of building collections of materials to support research and create a record of scholarly and artistic output. The rise in the use of smart mobile devices that allow individuals to store large quantities of music and use sites like YouTube has created an expectation that finding and accessing music should be convenient and easy. This article examines the ways in which university music faculty members in the United States consider YouTube use in their teaching and research. It finds that there are differences in how faculty in different music subdisciplines view and use YouTube, and that there is a dichotomy in how faculty as a whole value YouTube for teaching compared with their own work. Faculty understanding of YouTube’s content, legality, and applications for teaching and research varies widely. Finally, this article illuminates how faculty view their institutional libraries in comparison to sites like YouTube, and explores the implications all of this might have for the future of library collections.

This Chapter provides a summary of the challenges faced by music searchers and a chronological overview of how music information seeking capabilities and resulting user behavior in library settings have changed over time as bibliographic control tools have evolved from card catalogs to online discovery systems. It revisits some of the studies reviewed by King in 2005 and also evaluates studies done in the decade since, identifying trends in music information seeking behavior. Finally, it looks briefly at recommendations for music requirements in catalogs and specialized interfaces.

Loanable technology in libraries is not a new phenomenon and libraries have for many years made laptops and other items available to students and faculty for their research and class projects. However, tablets are a newer technology that presents new challenges for libraries wishing to loan them to patrons. This article explores the process by which one music and performing arts library implemented a loanable iPad program. Issues regarding setup, device control and management, applications, marketing, and circulation procedures, policies and problems are presented and discussed.

The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) consists of digitized print materials contributed from the collections of some of the foremost research libraries of the world. The HTDL contains over 11 million volumes comprising approximately 3.9 billion pages. In this paper, we describe an exploratory bibliometric study to examine and characterize music-related content in the HTDL. Our study provides an overview of the music-related content in the HTDL as seen through the lenses of format, genre, language, and chronology. We seek to determine in what ways, if any, the materials in HTDL could be considered to form a unique music digital library for use by musicology scholars and students. We also suggest ways in which the music-related content of the HTDL holdings could be made more useful to users with musicological needs and interests.

Patrons' changing needs and expectations, evolving collection delivery modes, increased scrutiny of subject-specialist librarians and libraries, combined with increased demand for accountability from administrators and constituents, means that academic music libraries can no longer continue to maintain the status quo when delivering services. Rather, they need to take this opportunity to assess their current reference service practices and determine whether changes should be made better to meet the patrons' needs. This article offers a look at assessment theory, tools for reference assessment, and a discussion of practical changes which can be affected in reference services based on assessment outcomes.