After the Canon: Developing Divergent and Local Music Collections at UCLA (Best of Chapters)

In libraries, where there is neither the money nor space to purchase and store everything published, canons were deemed “essential” or “core” and drove collection development efforts. However, music pedagogy and scholarship have been moving away from canons, as scholars increasingly seek to diversify both within the traditional domain of European Art Music (by looking at women, minorities, queer studies, music of the Americas, etc.) and without (by including jazz, popular music, and non-Western traditions). Furthermore, canons are becoming less relevant as pedagogy shifts from focusing on what students “need to know” to concentrate instead on methodological tools and critical thinking skills for students to use while approaching a broader array of topics and repertoire. The challenge then, for libraries, is how to support these changes in music pedagogy and scholarship given the fiscal and spatial constraints that libraries often face. In this presentation, we will share various ways the UCLA Music Library is responding to these challenges and how we are actively moving our collections and services beyond the traditional canon. We have refocused collection development on local music, picking particular areas and diving deep. For example, we have started collections focusing on local punk, and hip hop. Punk and hip hop have strong roots in the local music scenes, and in addition to being areas of interest to the scholars at our institution, they tend to be areas that are less documented and represented in cultural institutions. Another strategy has been to uncover and highlight existing unique collections within our larger collection, such as the scores from the Federal Music Project, which formed the start of our library, and scores from the former Soviet Union. In the presentation we will discuss our approach in more detail, share our efforts to make these collections more discoverable and prominent, and encourage the coordination for developing local collections