Feature Articles

Academics Through Music
by Katy Spencer, Library Support Center Representative

Acknowledged as one of the exemplary music review resources specifically written for librarians, CD Hotlist encourages librarians to refine their ears and expand their collections. Rick Anderson, the founder of CD Hotlist and the rest of the CD Hotlist staff have re-defined collection development practices, all the while allowing librarians to reconnect with their inner musicians. We are now providing links to the latest edition of CD Hotlist directly from Academia.

A music aficionado and Resource Acquisitions Librarian at University of Nevada/Reno, Rick Anderson has performed in jazz combos, fife-and-drum groups, a successful ska and reggae band and a not so successful garage band. Merging his professional and personal interest, CD Hotlist was founded in 1999.

How did the CD Hotlist (CDHL) evolve as an internet resource? Was there a demand from colleagues for such a service?

I was writing CD reviews for a couple of different outlets and getting anywhere from 10 to 30 new releases each week. I knew that some of these titles were items that libraries would probably want to know about, but as a librarian, I also knew that none of us has time to go through all the release lists and review sources that are out there and make a title-by-title decision about every new release. So, I thought I'd pick between 12 and 15 discs each month that struck me as being of particular interest to libraries -- especially things that were unusual and out-of-the-way, and that my colleagues might not hear about otherwise -- and put very brief reviews of them on a website.

From the beginning, the idea was to make CD HotList strictly utilitarian: there were no cover images at first, and no fancy design or anything. For each entry, I included all the information that a librarian would need to create an order record (artist, title, catalog number, list price, etc.) along with a brief paragraph explaining why I thought the title in question was one that a library might want to consider. I didn't usually include an item simply because it was "really good" -- usually, it had to be something that had some kind of research significance.

I started publishing CDHL in 1999, and the response was immediate and positive, so I kept it going. After a couple of years, I sent a message out to the music library community asking if anyone else would like to help out with contributions; that invitation garnered several contributors. Then things started changing a bit with my job and I got busier. I contacted B&T to see about turning CDHL into a cooperative venture with a distributor.

You mention a point in time when CD Hotlist could evolve as a cooperative venture with a distributor. What led you to choose Baker & Taylor as that distributor?

I knew that B&T had both a massive and well-organized warehousing network and a long history of working with libraries. As it turned out, Reno is the warehousing hub for Baker and Taylor's media division, and Bill Hartman (who was then Baker & Taylor's Vice President of Audio Visual Services) lived here in Reno as well. The idea for a cooperative venture evolved over the course of several lunches and phone conversations. It just turned out to be a natural fit.


Were you at all concerned about the autonomy of CD Hotlist during the integration with Baker & Taylor?

Yes and I'm sure some CD HotList readers were as well. With those concerns in mind, I made two things very clear from the outset. First, that the only way this partnership could work would be if CDHL remained freely available to the general public -- not just a service for B&T customers. Second, that the contributors and I would need to have the freedom to recommend recordings that aren't available via B&T.

What our readers now have is the same thing they had before, only more extensive, and with click-to-order functionality -- which they can use, or not, as they see fit. While CD HotList makes it easy to order recordings from B&T, there's no pressure on readers to do so. Anyone can use it.


How do you choose the CD's you review? Are the selections subject to B&T availability?

Now that CDHL covers 40-50 titles per month rather than 12-15, I've opened up the criteria a bit. While we still try to draw attention to lots of independent and out-of-the-way titles, we also cover more mainstream stuff that we think libraries should consider acquiring. We do cover things that are not available via B&T, and in those cases we provide as much contact information as we can so that readers will be able to order them with relative ease. The only things I really steer clear of are titles that are so obscure and poorly distributed that I can't figure out how a library would get ahold of them.


Is there a genre you avoid reviewing?

No, and that's something I'm very proud of. Among our contributors we have specialists in jazz, folk, the avant-garde, alternative rock, world music -- you name it. Since I've got pretty broad and eclectic musical tastes myself, I'm able to fill in the gaps and we can cover just about any kind of music you can imagine. We've recommended everything from medieval plainchant and experimental klezmer music to hip hop and Southern gospel. What we're looking for is anything that an academic or public library ought to know about. Everything we review won't be a perfect fit for every library, of course, but we try to stick our hands into the flood of new discs that are released each month and pull out those that are most likely to be of interest to the most libraries. Since different libraries have different needs, we try to look at as broad a range of musical styles as possible.


How does one become a reviewer for CD Hotlist? Are there certain standards that are upheld for reviewers and the reviews they write?

There isn't really a formal procedure in place for becoming a CDHL contributor. Anyone who is interested should send me an email (rickand@unr.edu) and a writing sample or two, along with a brief overview of his or her background. Contributors should have library experience (though they don't have to be librarians currently) and, obviously, should know at least one or two genres of music fairly deeply. Writing ability is important as well, though the reviews are mostly quite short and I do edit all content before it goes online.


Is the Internet (online ordering and access to information) shaping collection development practices?

In particular, it's dramatically changed the way we find out about new publications and the way we communicate with publishers and vendors. The Internet doesn't do everything better than a traditional library does, but one thing that it does vastly better than a library is provide access to information about the publishing marketplace.

I was a student employee in the university library at Brigham Young University before the advent of the Web, and I used to spend my lunch hours in the music reference stacks, looking for record label addresses in the business directories. It was awful -- the directories were incomplete and inaccurate, and they were out of date the moment they were published. And of course none of them had email addresses or websites, so the only way I could communicate with a label was by phone or letter. I was in a constant state of frustration. That situation sounds like ancient history now, but it was only fifteen years ago!

Now I contact labels and publishers with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes, and if I hear about a label that I didn't know about before, I can usually find its website in less than ten seconds. Now my frustration is that there's so much great stuff to hear and so little time to listen to it.


You are the Director of Resource Acquisition at University of Nevada/Reno. Do you feel that the availability of information is changing the role of the acquisitions librarian?

Absolutely, and in ways that are more fundamental than we may realize. Everything about the way we do our jobs was originally designed to deal with a print-based information world. For most kinds of information, print is now an ancillary format, and yet acquisitions and serials work is still organized around the idea of managing print. That's changing, but I'm not sure it's changing quickly enough and I'm not sure most of us (myself included) are dealing effectively with the really fundamental changes that have taken place in the information world over the past eight or ten years. Until quite recently, our primary job was to select, gather and organize physical containers of information. Now our primary job is to broker and manage online access to information. We tend to think that these are just two different ways of doing the same thing -- provide information to patrons -- but in fact, they're radically different things that require different skills, different sets of tasks, different workflows, different ways of working with patrons.


Why should a collection development librarian expand his or her music collections?

Well, the degree to which a library is able to really expand its collection of recordings is obviously going to vary quite a bit from institution to institution. For most libraries, whether they're public or academic, sound recordings represent a relatively small part of the materials budget (and a small part of the library staff's "time budget" as well). And yet for some patrons and some parts of the curriculum, recordings are a really essential part of the collection, so a solid, well-developed recordings collection is very important. My hope is that CDHL makes it a little bit easier for librarians to use their scarce time and money in an effective way.


What are the 5 pieces of music that every library should have in their collection?

I think I'll just pick one recording from each of the five genre divisions that we use in CD HotList:

CLASSICAL: J.S. Bach,"Kunst der Fuge", Deutsche Grammophon 463 027-2, 1999 [CD reissue]. 6305556539

You can waste your whole life arguing about who the greatest composer in the Western art-music tradition is, but for me it comes down to Bach -- and even then you've got a problem: What do you pick? One of the concertos? A cantata? The "Magnificat"? The keyboard works?

I think the best single example of his genius is the "Art of Fugue", and my favorite recording is the one by Musica Antiqua Koln on Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv imprint. This group's interpretations of Bach have been controversial in the past, and with good reason, but I think they approach this set of compositions with real insight, elegance and taste.

JAZZ: Louis Armstrong, "The 25 Greatest Hot Fives & Hot Sevens", ASV Living Era 5171, 1995.

Again, an impossible question, and this is one where my personal tastes and my critical judgment part ways. For example, if I had to take a single jazz album with me to a desert island it would probably be the "Complete Riverside Recordings" box by Thelonious Monk. But that's not because I think he's the greatest or most essential jazzman of all time; it's just that his music appeals to me so completely on a personal level. For a library, I think the single most essential jazz document would have to be ASV's 25-track distillation of Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings. This disc sheds light on everything that came after.

COUNTRY/FOLK:
"Hank Williams: The Ultimate Collection", Universal B000391900, 2002 6307132817
Gordon Bok, "Turning Toward the Morning", Folk Legacy 56, 1999 [CD reissue]. 6309157906

I'm going to cheat here and make two recommendations, one from the country side and one from the folk side. For country music, I don't even hesitate: every library should own Universal's two-disc collection of Hank Williams singles.

On the folk side, I have to go with an obscurity: there's a guy from Maine named Gordon Bok who has made some of the best and most moving records I've ever heard, but who has somehow managed to stay largely below the national radar. His "Turning Toward the Morning" is one of my favorite albums of all time in any genre.

ROCK: The Clash, "London Calling: Legacy Edition", Sony Legacy E3K92923. 6300307980

By 1980, the Clash wasn't a punk band anymore; it was the best rock'n'roll band in the world. "London Calling" was their masterpiece, a grand tour of their musical influences (from English music hall to ska to Latin jazz to old movies) and is crammed with some of the most powerful pop songs ever recorded. If you can listen to "Death or Glory" without pumping your fist in the air, then you need to see a doctor. Libraries should buy the deluxe CD-plus-documentary-DVD reissue set that came out in 2004

WORLD/ETHNIC: Various Artists, "The Indestructible Beat of Soweto", Shanachie 430331990 [CD reissue] 6309891642

I'm going to have to go with "The Indestructible Beat of Soweto", which is probably the best single compilation of apartheid-era South African pop music. Its success spawned a whole series of discs under the same title (I believe it went up to five volumes), but the first one is the place to start.

What is the future of CD Hotlist? Any interest in including Multimedia samples?

That would be great! And since it looks like downloading music is gradually becoming the preferred mode of purchase, I wouldn't be surprised to see CD HotList eventually become a portal for actual real-time music acquisition. I've also encouraged Baker & Taylor to look at the possibility of creating an approval-type program for sound recordings, whereby libraries can define profiles and have recordings sent to them automatically. I'm not sure whether that suggestion has sparked any interest at Baker & Taylor, but it's always seemed to me like a service that libraries would be thrilled to have (I know I would), and it's one in which CD HotList could play an important part.