Keeping Time: An Introduction to Archival Best Practices for Music Librarians by Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Keeping Time: An Introduction to Archival Best Practices for Music Librarians by Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force Creighton Barrett Keeping Time: An Introduction to Archival Best Practices for Music Librarians. By Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force. (Music Library Association Basic Manual Series, no. 9.) Middleton, WI: Music Library Association and A-R Editions, 2014. [xiv, 143 p. ISBN 9780895797865. $50.] Illustrations, appendices, glossary, bibliographic references, suggested readings, index. Librarians and archivists share many common values and responsibilities, but each profession is charged with managing collections with divergent requirements for acquisition, preservation, description, and use. And yet, library and archival collections are frequently unified by institutional missions, collection mandates, administrative structures, and physical spaces. This is particularly true when it comes to music libraries, which frequently include archival materials such as manuscript scores, noncommercial sound and video recordings, photographs, and similar. In Keeping Time, authors Lisa Hooper and Donald C. Force address the colliding worlds of music libraries and archives with a comprehensive introduction to archival best practices for music librarians. The manual is the ninth volume of the Music Library Association’s Basic Manual Series, and the first full-length monograph for both authors. Hooper is the Head of the Music and Media Center in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, and Force is Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Force was involved with the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems Project (InterPARES) at the University of British Columbia and has written about records management and electronic records, while Hooper has written on various topics in music archives and libraries and is a regular presenter at regional and national meetings of the Music Library Association (MLA). Keeping Time is a modern and accessible introduction to archival best practices that uses practical examples and hypothetical situations to tailor the content for music librarians. The manual adopts the structure of many archives manuals and textbooks, with the content organized according to what archivists call the “core archival functions.” After a historical introduction, the chapters flow through the steps an archivist would take with a new collection: acquisition and accessioning, arrangement, description, and preservation. The manual lacks a chapter on access services, typically considered a core archival function, but reading room best practices are addressed in the chapter on preservation. Chapters on digitization and funding expand on the core archival functions and should be of wider interest to music librarians. The manual is rounded out with a series of appendices, a glossary, a list of suggested readings, and a five-page index. Hooper and Force begin with a very brief history of archives that serves its purpose well. The basic tenets of archives are easier to comprehend when they are given some historical context, and chapter one puts the core principles of archival science squarely in the context of the French Revolution. The chapter’s brevity, however, results in the exclusion of some important details. The brief section on postmodernism in archives, for example, only makes vague references to Derrida’s Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and simply states that “archivists have become aware that their duties of appraisal, [End Page 674] arrangement, description, and preservation play an intrinsic role in determining whose history is remembered and how it is written” (p. 6). The second chapter focuses on acquisitions and accessioning, core functions upon which all other archival activities are based. At the beginning of the chapter, Hooper and Force comment that these functions “mark the beginning of a collection’s journey from an unprocessed collection in a private home or business to a fully processed, preserved, described, and accessible collection in a music library’s archival holdings or special collections” (p. 7). Highlights from this chapter include an excellent list of questions to be asked when determining whether an archival collection should be acquired and a list of talking points for speaking to donors. Chapter 3 introduces archival appraisal, considered by many archivists to be the most intellectually demanding archival function, and one that distinguishes archival work from other related disciplines. The chapter focuses on appraisals performed after acquisition. Pre-acquisition appraisal...