This is a message from CTLS-L. Selecting "Reply" will send a message to the originator. Selecting "Reply to All" will send a message to the entire list. --------------------------------------------------------- Some students (and possibly faculty) that work the Texas State University radio station want to meet with me on Friday about starting a music collection on CD. Apparently, they want to give us a lot of the preview CD's that they receive as a radio station. They have also indicated that they may provide some on-going money to support the collection. It is hard to know from our preliminary conversation what quality and quantity of support that they are talking about. We used to have a music collection -- first on records then on tapes. We got rid of it about 8 years ago. It was really never very good, because we didn't throw that much money at it. We also added quite a few donations to it, so eventually after wear and tear and other losses, it was an embarrassing assortment of music. I am pretty hesitant to go down this road again. For one thing, music seems so widely available these days -- between excellent radio stations, satellite radio, and the ability to download individual songs for about 90 cents each. However, it seems that in a lot of libraries these collections are pretty popular. What are some of the issues that I may want to consider prior to meeting with these enthusiastic students? How difficult is the processing and security on music CD's? What is the best way to shelve the collection (we are short on space)? How much money would a library need to invest on an annual basis to feel that they had a good, well-rounded collection? How popular is this likely to be in the year 2005 and beyond? Are there some good online services that a library can subscribe to on behalf of their patrons that would satisfy this service niche without us having to actually own the CD's ourselves? How much do these cost and how do they work? Any other information or insights that you can provide to me would be very helpful. Thank you, Stephanie Stephanie
Langenkamp
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Title: Questions about developing a music collection
