Digital distribution of sheet music
in Danish libraries
During 2004 the distributor of digital
sheet music ‘SheetMusicNow’ carried
out a project that aimed at investigating
how digital sheet music could be
made available to Danish libraries and
library users. The project was funded
by the Danish National Library Authority.
Currently, 35 Danish libraries have
made agreements with ‘SheetMusic-Now’, who provides access to more
than 14,000 pieces of music (classical,
jazz and Danish popular music) and
see to it that all conditions are cleared
with composers and publishers.
Library users can easily access the catalogue
from their personal computer or
at the library and order and receive the
sheet music at their local library.
Further development will try to establish
solutions where the user can print
sheet music at home.
Erik Thorlund Jepsen,
library consultant
Danish National Library Authority
etj@bs.dk
Seamless user rights
Integration of user rights, also called
seamless user rights has to do with
focusing on the user. The aim is to
create the easiest and most transparent
access to the public and research libraries’
collective media and services. The
County of Århus has conducted an
analysis of barriers and possibilities for
integration of user rights to public and
research libraries. It is a strategic choice
whether the libraries want to develop
user rights across public and research
libraries, or whether they choose exclusively
to prioritise cooperation internally
in the two sectors where major
structural reforms are under way. The
Structural Reform changes relations
between owners and institutions. In the
research library sector, some institutions
will upgrade the internal tasks in
the universities rather than increase
their cooperation with the public libraries.
Integration of user rights to public
and research libraries in the County of
Århus may assume many diverse
forms. The more complex the model
one decides on, the greater the barriers
to overcome, both politically, organisationally,
economically and legally. In
the end the final decision rests with the
political decision-makers.
Caroline Søndergaard Bendixen
Danish National Library Authority
csb@bs.dk
Survey of students’ use of the library
Danish students seem to use the libraries
indiscriminately, ordering via
library.dk and picking up books at
their local public library that might
have been dispatched from their own
institutional library. The Danish National
Library Authority has therefore
initiated a survey of the students’ use of
the library. The survey was conducted
in cooperation with the Royal School
of Library and Information Science as
part of a research project, with Niels
Ole Pors as project manager.
The main conclusions are these: 85%
of the students use the institutional
libraries, 58% use the public libraries
for study purposes. The group that
borrows a lot/renews most comes from
medium-length education – and they
are also the most diligent users of the
public library. The group has the
closest interaction between education
and library.
Only 3% of the students do not use
Google for study purposes. 80% use
Google at least every week. The most
frequent users of Google also use
library resources.
Subjects and level of education seem to
have a great impact on library use.
However, the most decisive factor
appears to be the attitude of the
students. Those students, who use the
library, use it intensively. It transpires
that it is very important whether the
teacher refers to the library and
whether the course demands that the
student himself has to find supplementary
literature.
In the next issue of SPLQ the results
from the survey will be discussed in an
article.
Jonna Holmgaard Larsen
Editor-in-chief, SPLQ
jhl@bs.dk
