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Article Excerpt
Naxos Music Library (Internet music resource). Naxos Digital Services Ltd. http://www.naxosmusiclibrary.com. [Requires: For PC users: Microsoft Windows 98, 2000, or XP with Internet Explorer 6.0, Mozilla 1.7.1, FireFox 1.0, Netscape 7.1, or Opera 7.53 and Media Player 9.0/10.0; for Macintosh users: OS 8.6 or 9.0 with Internet Explorer 5.1 and Media Player 7.1; or OS X 10.2.8 or 10.3.5 with Internet Explorer 5.2, Mozilla 1.7, Netscape 7.1, Opera 7.53, or Safari 1.0 and Media Player 9.0. Pricing: from $750 per year for 5 simultaneous users, incrementing in steps of 5 additional users to $2,500 per year for 25 simultaneous users, thereafter priced at $50 for each additional user. Willing to discuss other pricing models with large institutions and consortia.]
Since the publication of the joint review of the Naxos Music Library by Ned Quist, Darwin F. Scott, and Alec McLane in Notes (vol. 61, no. 2 [December 2004]: 512-16), Naxos Digital Services has made several changes to its product. In addition, numerous colleges, universities, and library consortia took the Naxos Music Library through its first intense paces at an academic level during the fall semester of 2004. Unfortunately the results were less than stellar. This follow-up review summarizes and critiques some of these new features, various enhancements to the product (frequently in response to suggestions from the library community), and Naxos's performance during a demanding period of collegiate use. All comments in this review are based on three sources of first-hand information: the experiences of participating libraries in the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) following a consortial subscription for one hundred simultaneous users that commenced in August 2004; communications posted on the Music Library Association (MLA) electronic mail list MLA-L during the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005; and the state of the Naxos Music Library Web site at http://www.naxosmusiclibrary.com/ (via BLC subscription access through Brandeis University) during the same period. Readers should bear in mind that the frequent changes and updates Naxos made to this service during its first year of marketing to libraries inevitably make a review such as this slightly out date, and it is likely that Naxos will have addressed many of the issues cited here by the time this critique appears in print. Indeed, this is already the case. Responding to the joint review presentation of the Naxos Music Library by Scott and McLane at the 2005 annual meeting of the Music Library Association in Vancouver, B.C. (see below), Klaus Heymann, managing director of HNH International (the parent company of Naxos Digital Services Ltd.), has already implemented some of the suggested enhancements for the product (see Scott's responses to Heymann's comments on the criticism posted on MLA-L, 19 April 2005).
The fall semester of 2004 was indeed a testing ground for the Naxos Music Library. Impressed with the depth and diversity of the Naxos content and what appeared to be an efficient means for providing streaming audio for library reserves--as well as an exciting aural counterpart to electronic text resources such as JSTOR or Grove Music Online--numerous libraries set up subscriptions during the summer, perhaps naively expecting all to go without a hitch when the students returned and instructors began to add Naxos links to their course management pages. It quickly became apparent that the product was not quite ready for academic prime time, as connections failed, access fizzled midstream, browsers malfunctioned, patrons got shut out, and any number of other frustrations surfaced. The faculty and students came to Naxos with high expectations--but the bevy of difficulties that rapidly surfaced at many institutions dissipated much of the initial enthusiasm for the product. In all fairness, however, without a lengthy beta-test phase, Naxos could not have possibly anticipated the myriad of problems inevitable in an electronic environment with wildly divergent, sometimes incompatible, and frequently outdated equipment, software, Internet connections, proxy servers, and other components of the campus computing infrastructure. Librarians and campus technicians soon learned that the commercial delivery of remotely stored streaming audio is a...
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