Hmmmmm... I definitely need to have a better way of keeping, storing, and cataloging the music that my wife and I have in our library of music scores. I guess it is sort of an occupational hazard for any professional musician... and a problem that doubles (or more...) when there are two of you in the same house. Every now and then, we have the well-intentioned desire to sort and regather all the music... either by period, or style, or composer, or by ensemble composition... or a mix of all of the above.

... but sadly, the scores are there to be used, and not to be left completely in pristine condition... and given the time constraints that we have... normally, music gets pulled out, read or looked at, and then is hastily returned back to the easiest spot... and to add to the chaos, my wife and I tend to have different ordering systems, and so I will put things back in one spot, and she will tend to put them back in a completely different spot!

Plus, the fact that all of the music is standing up on their ends tends to damage the spines over time, and give all the music a slight bend to them. But lying them downhas its own particular problems as well!

I have seen some music stores lie them down, and then have labels on the shelving instead. The shelves are also able to roll out, so that you don't damage books whilst you are pulling things out and pushing them back in.

Now, I'm pretty sure that many of you are thinking... why don't you just digitise the whole thing? Well, there are two answers to that... the first is the simplest... we ALSO have a HUGE digital collection of scores, parts, and facsimiles! So much already, that it easily chomps down a full Terabyte or two of NAS storage... and it is growing constantly! In fact, while I was writing this, I downloaded a few more fasimiles of some pieces that I want to have on hand for our ensemble... from scans of the original manuscripts from the 18th century...

So... side tracked... anyway, although I like having the large digital collection... the truth is that the music that is in the shelves is more likely to be pulled out for a quite browse and a read with my wife... and the stuff in the digital library tends to only get pulled out when we are looking for something specific. I'm sure that other people have the same experience with e-books versus physical books... you tend to just browse the book library, but you tend to go straight for the electronic version that you want...

... and there is nothing wrong with that... but losing the browsing aspect, well, it means that you don't stumble across things that you never knew you didn't know about. Come to think of it... this was the same arguments that was used to argue against the closing of the university's music library when the posited that the Arts and Music library weren't getting the same metrics in loans that would justify their continued physical presence. But, I remember using the library as a student... and also as an adult, I would just sit there opening up all the scores and looking for that hidden little gem that I hadn't seen before...

Anyway, our particular problem is going to be hopefully solved when we complete our 5-10 year plan of building out a music studio... and part of that will include a dedicated music library space! Still dreaming about it... there are many other things that need to be done first, but the dream is there!

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