Music, Youtube, and Academic Libraries

Abstract

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.

University Music Students’ Choice of Music Listening Sources: Use of Library Resources as Compared with Non-Academic Streaming Services

“…The disparity between concentration groups, with performance students preferring to cite library sources and composition students favoring commercial sources, is a reversal from Dougan's findings. 62 The implication that there has been a shift in opinion over what constitutes an acceptable, credible research resource for each concentration necessitates additional research, such as determining if there are distinctions between concentrations in requirements for quality of sources. The same examination between listening source and program of study however, failed to reveal any meaningful correlation.…”

“…2 Librarians cannot be certain if music faculty expect their students to rely on the library for their audio needs, as may have previously been assumed. 3 Complicating libraries' efforts to maintain an audio collection that meets their users' needs is the rapid advancement of musiclistening technology. While many music libraries possess collections of CDs, disk drives are no longer a standard component of laptop computers.…”

“…With YouTube especially, descriptive information about the material is "provided by the uploader, and not held to any metadata standard as in library catalogs". 43 Commercial services, more broadly, have been designed to provide access to popular music and do not sufficiently take into account the structured elements of other genres. 44 The inability to filter streaming platforms by facets such as composer versus performer, movement number, and language presents a challenge to students when searching for highly specific pieces of music.…”

Faculty Format Preferences in the Performing Arts: A Multi-Institutional Study

“…She offered inconvenience, lack of content, or ignorance as possible reasons, and recommended a follow-up study. 23 Among the themes that emerge in our literature review is a trend toward more acceptance of, and preference for, electronic formats, especially regarding reference, journal, audio, and video content. Regarding audio and video content, users seemed more concerned that the material is easily and immediately accessible than with its legality, future availability, or quality.…”

“…She also identified a dichotomy between using YouTube for instructional purposes and preferences for their own scholarly work. 22 Dougan questioned why faculty did not require that students use library-provided streaming resources. She offered inconvenience, lack of content, or ignorance as possible reasons, and recommended a follow-up study.…”