For several years now libraries, publishers, and vendors have worked out a means of creating, licensing, and delivering e-books in academic settings. While the art of the academic e-book is perhaps not quite yet perfected, conservatively speaking today’s students and faculty will find and use at least one e-book in the course of their academic career and be more or less satisfied with the experience. E-scores, however, are only now coming to occupy the attention of librarians, and not a moment too soon as commercial e-score vendors with sub-par quality content manage to meet the functionality needs of most users. Many living composers are harnessing the internet and cutting out the middle man by offering “e-scores” in the form of downloadable PDFs. Score publishers are by and large still in the early stages of thinking about moving to e-score format (also for personal downloads), and vendors with e-score platforms are negligible. This session seeks to open the conversation about e-scores to acquisition librarians, e-book publishers and vendors who typically work outside the music library.
During the first half of this session audience members will learn about the current state of e-scores in academic libraries, including what patrons want from e-scores, what score publishers are doing, what libraries are currently able to provide, and, finally, what commercial vendors are already doing. Audience members will bring their own e-book, publishing, technological, and acquisitions experience and expertise to the many issues surrounding e-scores by responding to a series of open questions presented to them during the second half of the session. Through this open questioning, it is hoped that audience members will come to new understandings of their own work with other electronic materials while at the same time bring their expertise to bear on the future of e-score development.
