When:
Thursday, November 10, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT
Where: Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Center for the Musical Arts, 1-168, 70 Arts Circle, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Cost: Free
Contact:
Milena Schaller
Group: Musicology Colloquium Series
Category: Academic
Alan Akers, who received his Masters in Musicology from Northwestern, and is now Research Services Assistant at Northwestern’s Music Library, will be giving a talk on "Reassembling the Musical Past: Intersections of Musicology, Library Science, and Archival Practice in the Moldenhauer Collection at Northwestern."
Abstract:
Assembled over the course of forty years by the late musicologist and music collector, Hans Moldenhauer (1906-1987), the Moldenhauer Archives, constitute an unparalleled collection of music manuscripts and primary sources documenting the history of western music. Today the Moldenhauer Archives are distributed among nine institutions worldwide with a significant and sizable portion residing at Northwestern University’s Music Library.
The distribution of the Moldenhauer Archives into separate collections has long been problematic for researchers and librarians alike. Recent research inquiries demonstrated the existing inventory and arrangement scheme to be inadequate and inaccurate, not to mention incomplete, as many materials had never been catalogued. Applying the principles of archival arrangement and description, the collection was completely reprocessed and a complete item-level descriptive finding aid was created.
Processing this unique antiquarian collection, required the simultaneous skill set of a musicologist, music librarian and archivist. The intersection of these disciplines will be explored through the challenges faced in accurately identifying and describing the musical and non-musical materials, grappling with intellectual and physical arrangement decisions, anticipating the access needs of researchers, and addressing preservation concerns for such a diversity of formats and age of materials.
Bio: Alan Akers has been the Research Services Assistant at Northwestern’s Music Library since 2013. He received the Master of Music degree in Musicology from Northwestern in 2009 and is currently completing the Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign – specializing archives, academic and special collections librarianship.