Music Library Association Opens Publications at Internet Archive
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 5:45 am
This is a great time to be an archivist and librarian—digital memory is ever more important and more difficult to manage.
Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public webpage ever created and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By using mostly existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this, as well as compensate authors, within the current worldwide library budget. Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world.
Will we allow ourselves to re-invent our concept of libraries and archives to expand and to use the new technologies? This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our phone number library governments’ spending priorities, and in law.
For librarians who specialize in caring for music collections, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest technology and resources in the profession. The Music Library Association recently helped address this problem by making many of its publications openly available online.
The MLA donated 21 of its monographs to the Internet Archive for digitization and worked with authors to make the material free to the public under Creative Commons licenses.
The new collection of backlist titles includes information on careers in music librarianship and history of the field. It also covers planning and building music library collections, which can be complicated and involve individual creators and small publishers, said Kathleen DeLaurenti, who helped lead the partnership with the Internet Archive in her role as MLA’s first open access editor. There are also valuable materials on music library approaches to technical services—everything from how to preserve music materials to how to bind and catalog them.
Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public webpage ever created and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By using mostly existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this, as well as compensate authors, within the current worldwide library budget. Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world.
Will we allow ourselves to re-invent our concept of libraries and archives to expand and to use the new technologies? This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our phone number library governments’ spending priorities, and in law.
For librarians who specialize in caring for music collections, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest technology and resources in the profession. The Music Library Association recently helped address this problem by making many of its publications openly available online.
The MLA donated 21 of its monographs to the Internet Archive for digitization and worked with authors to make the material free to the public under Creative Commons licenses.
The new collection of backlist titles includes information on careers in music librarianship and history of the field. It also covers planning and building music library collections, which can be complicated and involve individual creators and small publishers, said Kathleen DeLaurenti, who helped lead the partnership with the Internet Archive in her role as MLA’s first open access editor. There are also valuable materials on music library approaches to technical services—everything from how to preserve music materials to how to bind and catalog them.