Music collections in the library funds: Workshop on Music Conservatory of Geneva/Higher School of Music (January 7, 2006)

Some (private) musical collections such as collections of books, scores or sound recordings of artists and/or teachers raise specific problems for professionals working in library science as well as in research workshops in performance practice. These collections of documents are of great importance to the historian. Many of them show marks of former use (for example in annotated scores) and there is much to explore into how these collections were compiled: a kind of material basis on which the artistic or pedagogic career of the owner was built. This relatively recent awareness gives rise to an evolution of methods used by libraries. They traditionally favoured the individual document and not the collection as a whole compiled for a specific use, in this case that of musical performance. Several specialists assembled at the Conservatory of Geneva to consider these questions on January 7, 2006.