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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
MLA-L, the electronic-mail distribution list for music librarians, is now twenty years old. Before the establishment of the list in 1989, professional communication among music librarians was paper based and slow. The growth of computer networks in the early 1980s led to the development of applications to promote group communication, including LISTSERV, an e-mail distribution application released in 1986. With the help of Mary Papakhian, a member of the information technology staff at Indiana University, Ralph Papakhian established MLA-L as the first distribution list on the university's LISTSERV server. Growth of the list was rapid: by the end of 1995, there were over 1,000 subscribers, and since then the number has slowly increased to over 1,100. The topics of discussion on MLA-L cover all aspects of the profession, and the archives of messages posted to the list provide a rich resource for the study of the history of music librarianship.
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A quick glance through issues of the MLA Newsletter from the late 1980s gives a good picture of how music librarians shared information with each other in the years before the Web, when even e-mail was still a novelty. In those issues there was a regular column titled "Musical Queries," compiled by Karl Van Ausdahl. If you had a question you couldn't answer using the resources available in your library, you sent it to Van Ausdahl, and a few months later he published it in the column. Readers who could answer the question sent in replies, and Van Ausdahl published them in the next issue. In the March-April 1988 column, for example, we find:
Query #2: Anna Seaborg (King County Library system, Seattle, WA) is looking for information on a French tango singer named Francis Cabrel. This singer was mentioned in the recent film "Broadcast News." (1)
Six months and two issues later, Van Ausdahl reports that Bonnie Jo Dopp had sent him copies of the French text of the song sung in the movie as well as publication information for the cassette it appeared on, but no reader had been able to supply biographical information on Cabrel. (2) In the following issue, though, the question is answered. We learn, thanks to Monique Lecavalier of the University of Montreal, that there is an entry for Cabrel in Pascal Sevran's Dictionnaire de la chanson francais (1988) and that the singer was born in Astaffort, France, in 1953. (3) The time that had elapsed between the posing and the answering of this question was nine months.
The end of the 1980s was a busy time for MLA and its members, and these issues of the newsletter include many brief announcements and requests as well as lengthy committee and chapter reports. There are announcements of future meetings, grant opportunities, and essay contests. Committee chairs ask colleagues to send copies of local copyright guidelines and collection-development policies so that they can be studied, analyzed, and reported on for the benefit of all. A librarian asks whether someone could supply a photocopy of a missing journal issue, while others offer runs of journals that are no longer needed. There are reports of newly acquired special collections, such as the Rudy Vallee Collection at the American Library of Radio and Television. The New England and California chapters announce the publication of guides to music collections in their regions. Ohio State University notes the arrival of a music librarian from China who will be completing an internship in the library. A few months after the 1988 annual meeting in Minneapolis, a lost-and-found column reports that "A silver-colored metal pin, about two inches in diameter and resembling a poppy, was found on the dance floor after the MLA banquet, Friday 12 February." (4)
By the early 1990s, most of these queries and announcements had disappeared from the pages of the MLA Newsletter and moved to a forum that had been announced by Ralph Papakhian in spring 1989:
Indiana University is now hosting an electronic mail distribution service for the Music Library Association. Participants can mail messages to one address which will be distributed to all "subscribers." This distribution is limited to users of BITNET and the INTERNET. The "mailing list" is intended for communications relevant to MLA activities of general interest and to other matters of concern to the music library community at large. It is not intended for narrowly defined communications such as committee correspondence or local online systems users groups. For additional information contact the MLA Executive Secretary, A. Ralph Papakhian. ... (5)
The founding of the Music Library Association electronic mailing list (MLA-L) was a watershed moment in the history of music librarianship. For the majority of music librarians working today, MLA-L has been a central part of professional communication for most--if not all--of their careers. Nevertheless, it is easily taken for granted, since it rarely fails and there is nothing particularly remarkable about its technology. It is little more than an automated e-mail distribution list--the software simply takes a copy of an e-mail message and sends it to everyone who has subscribed to the list.
The technology might be simple--even primitive by today's standards--but with the advent of MLA-L, communication within the profession changed fundamentally. Through a simple e-mail message, information could now be exchanged with hundreds of colleagues nearly instantaneously. A query about an obscure French singer that had taken over nine months to answer in the newsletter could now be answered in hours--even minutes. And the owner of a poppy-shaped pin lost at the banquet could claim it within seconds.
In March 2009, twenty years will have passed since the first messages were distributed over MLA-L. On the occasion of this anniversary, I offer an account of MLA-L's founding and history.
COMMUNICATION BEFORE MLA-L
Music librarians are specialists within the field of librarianship, and our numbers have always been relatively small. There are only 950 individual members of the Music Library Association, and roughly half that number assembles each year for the annual meeting. The typical music librarian works with a collection that is part of a larger college, university, or public library system. While a few large research libraries employ several music librarians, most of us work alone--or perhaps with one other colleague--in a modestly sized music library within a college or university library.
Remember (if you are of that age) or imagine (if you are not) life before the Internet. Most music librarians, working in isolation, had limited opportunities to engage with the larger community of music librarians (6) For the formal communication of research and reports, there were the official publications of the association: Notes, the MLA Newsletter, and the Technical Reports and Index and Bibliography series. For the informal and more immediate communication that is essential to our jobs--finding someone to supply a copy of the missing last page of a Sibelius symphony or to look up a work number in the Sammartini thematic catalog your library does not own--the options were few.
Until the mid-1980s, unless you resorted to the telephone--something that was done rarely because of the high cost of long-distance calls--you wrote letters. For example, when I began working in my first job at Northwestern University in 1981, I typed letters to Papakhian, Richard Smiraglia, and other music catalogers to ask for advice as I dealt with the problems I encountered in my work. I'd mail a letter, and a few weeks later, I'd receive a reply. Exchanging letters was the norm for both formal and informal professional communication.
The place for a freewheeling exchange of ideas was the annual meeting, the one time in the year for a music librarian to communicate easily and informally with a large number of colleagues--to be introduced to a librarian from Texas who shares an interest in Handel bibliography or to ask a cataloger from the Library of Congress why there is a hyphen in the subject heading "Double-bass music" but not "Bass clarinet music."
NETWORKING IN THE LATE 1980s
BITNET and E-mail
By the late 1980s, electronic mail had become generally available in academia, but use was not widespread. As with all technologies, there were early adopters who took up the technology and explored its potential, but many years would pass before use became pervasive. The Internet was gaining critical mass as a number of independent research networks began interconnecting using the Internet protocol suite developed for ARPAnet by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (7) but use of the network at that time was restricted primarily to the military and federally funded scientists.
The prominent network for colleges and universities was BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork), a tree-structured chain of IBM mainframe computers that received and forwarded messages, files, and e-mail from one "node" to the next until they had reached their destinations. The first BITNET link was established between Yale University and the City University of New York in 1981, and the network quickly expanded to include a dozen East Coast universities. With the backing of a grant from IBM, the network continued to grow, and at its peak in 1989, BITNET connected about 500 institutions through 3,000 nodes. (8) It was a loosely organized network; joining BITNET required little more than a commitment to pay for a leased telephone line from your node to the nearest node on the network, and to allow a future connection to your node. (9)
When you sent e-mail over BITNET, you could follow your e-mail's passage across the network through on-screen messages that announced its arrival at each node on the path to its destination. When a node was down, the network attempted to find another path, but sometimes messages could be trapped for hours or days at an inactive node until the connection was restored.
Compared to the speed of today's Internet connections, the BITNET network was extraordinarily slow. The two lines connecting North America to Europe, for example, transferred data at a rate of 9,600 bytes per second. At this speed, it would have taken nearly two minutes to transfer one megabyte of data--the equivalent of about six seconds of CD-quality audio.
Discussion Groups
Usenet
The two major computer networks that emerged in the early 1980s, ARPAnet and BITNET, were accessible only to a select few in the early years when resources were scarce and expensive. As the networks grew, the demographics of network users diversified. Access was granted to researchers beyond the hard sciences, and eventually nonacademic professionals and the general public were stirred into the mix.
At most academic institutions, access to electronic mail and computer networks was available free of charge, and programmers were eager to create tools to make the most of these new technologies. One area of early development was group communication. Although e-mail made it possible to communicate with individuals, there was no easy way to share information with groups of users.
The first widely used application for group information sharing was Usenet (also known as Netnews). Like many groundbreaking computer technologies, Usenet was developed by college students, in this case students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, who wrote the program in 1979 to enhance network communication between the two campuses. Because the software was open and freely distributed, the Usenet network grew quickly during the early 1980s.
Usenet served as an electronic bulletin board for posting news and announcements. The postings were organized broadly by topic and then individually by "thread." Eventually, tens of thousands of sites maintained Usenet feeds, read by millions of participants. (10) It was not necessary to subscribe to a Usenet group; by simply adding the group to your newsreader you had the ability to read and post at will without intervention by a moderator. Because the newsreader was a stand-alone...
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