Jürgen Diet, President of AIBM, invited lecturer by the Swedish IAML Branch

Jürgen Diet, Project Manager at the Music Department of the Bavarian State Library in Munich and President of AIBM (the German IAML Branch), delivered the course Music in Digital Libraries and Archives, in Gothenburg 7-8 November. The two-day course was a shorter version of an international summer course arranged by the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, where Jürgen Diet is teaching the courses Digital Music Libraries and Digital Music Archiving within the master programme Library and Information Management.

Jürgen Diet had kindly accepted an invitation from the Swedish IAML Branch in spite of his hectic schedule. The course took place at the Academy of Music and Drama and the Gothenburg University Library from Friday at 13.00 to Saturday at 15.30. There were 19 participants – mostly from the Swedish music conservatoires, but also from the Music and Theatre Library in Stockholm, the National Library of Sweden and a couple of regional Swedish music archives. In addition we were happy to host three colleagues from the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo (members of the Norwegian IAML Branch).

The course was divided into six modules with lectures and exercises covering subjects like digital music formats, digitization, long-term archiving of digital music documents, FRBR etc. We also had a closer look at software tools like Smart Score and Musipedia; databases such as the RISM Opac; digital music libraries, for example "the Variations project" and other valuable resources. We were very impressed by all the search possibilities offered by the portal the Virtual Library of Musicology ("ViFa Musik"), demonstrated by Jürgen Diet.

In spite of the sometimes rather technical aspects of the subjects it was possible to follow the course even for "dilettants", such as myself, thanks to a well thought-out progression and the lecturer's sensitivity to the audience. Well, I must admit that I found it a little difficult to follow when Jürgen Diet explained the difference between the terms work, expression, manifestation and entity – the so-called Entity-Relationship-Modelling - during the last half hour of the course:-)! It had been a rather intense couple of days.

After the classroom activities on Friday we attended a concert with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra – a celebration of the 150:th anniversary of Richard Strauss with a couple of his tone poems and Vier letzte Lieder. After the concert followed a buffet in the Music and Drama Library in "Artisten" (the venue of the IAML conference in 2006).

I am sorry for repeating myself, but I really think collaboration between IAML's national branches has a great potential – not least when it comes to further training for our members. I would like to thank Jürgen Diet for an excellent course on behalf of all the participants!