THE MUSICAL INFORMATION SERVICES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Abstract

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 concern 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.

Citation

HYATT KING, A. (1957), "THE MUSICAL INFORMATION SERVICES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026239