Contemporary music centre collection.

Apologies about the delay with this guys.

Here's a brief outline of the interview I had with the Trish in the Contemporary Irish music centre.

I've listed them in the order I felt was most relevant.

They've had their budget greatly reduced and at the moment their annual budget form the arts council is 300'000 euro.

They rely on grants from other bodies to help stay afloat. An Foras Feasa, the institute for research in Irish historical and cultural traditions.


Their evaluaiton policy for collecting books is non existent as their collection is based around original scores that are contributed to them from the composers.Any books that are published relevant to the field in Ireland are purchased however very few come out, two this year so far. Both on Aloys Fleischman

The library is no longer fully staffed and all of the staff take it turns to cover it.


There day to day running consists of answering between five and ten very general queries, like have you got this composers score or where might I find that particular score.

Then there is about four or five questions which require a bit of research and ringing around to other centres.

So I think you could say the collection caters for a fairly educated clientele.

The libray is essentially the reference collection and it was interesting to hear how a non-government non-institutional reference collection was constantly working to secure the survial of itself and the overarching organisation.

Since funding had been cut so severly all efforts with in the organisation have been to promote and market the centre and thelibrary is used to coordinate the books that are acquired to the book shop. The reference collection here doubles as a library and co-ordinates the bookshops activities.

They use an in house data base system which was desigined by a company called file makers. http://www.filemaker.com/

Trisha advised that the most common search times by customers are instrumentation and duration.

Also their is a pressure for collection to make all its resources available online so that musicians and academics from other countries can access it.


I will be contacting her again.