Ask a Librarian: Music Collections- Webinar 20-11-19

*Speakers: Renee (RE), Sue (SU), Rachel (RA), Scotia (SC)
*Location: National Library of Australia
*Date: 20/11/2019

RE: And for those of you just joining us, welcome to our Ask a Librarian Music Collections webinar. My name is Renee. I'm the Acting Learning Program Coordinator in Reader Services section at the National Library. And soon I'll be joined by my colleagues Sue, Rachel and Scotia. We're all reference librarians at the National Library. I'd like to say at this point thank you to everyone who submitted a question for this webinar. Unfortunately we were only able to select four to answer in detail. But rest assured, if you did send a question to us, well, you will hear from us via our Ask a Librarian service, or from me by email. The questions we selected were those that we felt gave us broad scope for demonstrating a range of approaches or techniques that would be applicable to a range of questions. And also they would take us to many areas in the collection where you can find music and music related material.

Okay, so that's all the introduction for me I'll just stop the video so we can concentrate on the presentation. So let's do a session overview. After an Introduction to the Music Collection, we'll briefly cover other areas in the Library that hold music and music related material in our Special Collections. We'll also touch on highlights of the music collection and then we'll answer two of your questions, and then we'll pause for a Q & A break, then we'll answer the final two questions and pause for a final break, before wrapping up the session.

And these are the questions we'll be covering today. So one: how can I find out of copyright music to view at home? Question two: Symphony Australia collection and copyright issues. Three: researching entries in the National Anthem Quest in 1973. And finally, finding the words and music for "Molly Riley". Alright so what's in the music collection? And that is to say formats do we collect? Well, we collect our printed and digital music scores, albums, serials, music manuscripts, multimedia kits, educational publications and owner bound volumes. Some items have been digitised, which means that you can view them online and we'll see some examples of those soon. But what's not in the music collection? Well the formats we don't collect are commercial recordings, so we don't have commercially recorded CDs or cassettes or vinyl records. There are a few exceptions. Some of those items are in multimedia kits that we collect but in general since 1984 these formats have been collected by the National Film and Sound Archive, so if you're interested in those that's the place to go.

All right, so let's now move to our music collection. Well we have over 300,000 music scores and sheet music items which makes us the largest sheet music collection in Australia. We have primarily Australian published and unpublished sheet music covering a range of genres, but we also have some overseas music and they include overseas music published in Australia, which is useful for showing what Australians were playing or listening to at a particular time. And we also collect overseas music that provides context to researchers, or that's already included in larger formed collection, sorry, formed collections, that's been donated to the Library. Where you can find music and other special collections, we'll turn to that now.

So first manuscripts. You can find music and music related material in the manuscripts collection. So here's an example. Overall in the manuscripts collection we have the archives or the unpublished personal papers and correspondence of performers, composers and music organisations. Our image here shows an example of unpublished manuscript material. It's a salary book for the JC Williamson theatrical agency.

We also collect ephemera and photographs relating to musical performances and the music trade and on the screen we have an image of one of our performing arts ephemera scrapbooks of Bessie Campbell, the Banjo Queen, along with some other items that were inside her scrapbook, like programs and clippings. I've included a picture of Bessie on the right from our Pictures Collection, so you can see that our collections complement one another. And our Oral History and Folklore collection. This image was taken by John Meredith and it comes from the John Meredith Oral History and Folklore Collection which includes 500 recordings between the 1950s and 1990s. And it covers traditional Australian folk music, songs, bush dance music, stories and recounts. Some of these have been digitized and you can listen to them online, especially when you see this icon in the Catalogue. Okay, so let's turn to just touch on some highlights of our larger, some, some of our larger music collection items. There's certainly more than we had time to discuss today so I'll just touch on them. We have the State Theatre collection. Over 13,000 performance scores for the orchestral music used to accompany silent films in Australian film theatres. And the JC Williamson collection. We mentioned, uh we mentioned JC Williamson in connection with unpublished manuscripts previously, but the music collection in this larger collection, uh, comprises scores, performance parts, playscripts and libretti. And we have the Geoff Harvey music collection. Uh Geoff Harvey was the musical director for channel 9 for many years. This is a collection of almost 6,000 unpublished music arrangements and was used for many channel 9 television shows from the 60s to the 90s. And the Symphony Australia collection is a vast collection of chamber, choral, operatic, orchestral and vocal works by Australian composer and arrangers from colonial music to the 1970s. But my colleague, Sue, will discuss the Symphony Australia collection in more detail later in the webinar. So how do we get all of this material? Well, many of the published items in our collections come to us through Legal Deposit. So, under the Copyright Act the Library is required to collect Australian published publications, both hard copy through Legal Deposit and born digital items through eDeposit. This ensures that a comprehensive collection of published materials relating to Australia and its people is always preserved for future generations to use and as a result of all of these collecting activities we now have millions and millions of items for people to use in their research. We also purchase some items, for example second-hand printed music, and we've been fortunate to receive donations of manuscripts or collections of music from composers, conductors and their descendants. Where do we keep it all? Well what we can see here are some images of stacks, that is, underground shelved areas under the Library. This is where our music collection are kept safe and dry and organised .They are closed stacks, which means that only Library staff go there to retrieve items, usually when they've been requested to be used in the Special Collections

Reading Room. So whereas in many libraries you can go and browse the shelves to find what you're looking for, in the National Library our stacks are closed. So how do we find what we're looking for when we can't physically go and browse the shelves? Well we use the Library's online tools, like the Catalogue, and this applies just as much to us, as reference librarians, as it does to you, as researchers. And soon we'll share some of these techniques and that we use for doing those searches.

All right. Let's embark on question one, our first question, “How can I find out of copyright music that I can view at home?” Well, we selected this question to help people who ask us how to find music that they can perform freely or use in group practice at residential facilities schools or in charitable organisations. So there are two key elements to this question: "out of copyright" and "view at home" Now, to view music at home, I immediately think digitised music that you can view online. And we have digitized many older sheet music items, um, so do you, but they aren't always out of copyright. So how do you find the ones that are?

Alright, so the best place to start your search is in the catalogue's search box here and you can find it easily on the library's homepage. Alright, so we're just going to click through to the library's homepage... and before we start our search I'll just introduce you to some features of this page that you'l find useful. Ok, so if we go to the top of the page, the drop down menu gives us a list of collections. I could click on manuscripts or music or oral history and folklore and find out more about those collections... but for now I'm going to scroll down the page to another really important link, our "Get a library card" link. So you can click on that and you'd be directed to an online form, um, and then once you've filled it in we'll send a card out to your Australian residential address. Once you receive your card you could go to our eResources portal, you could login to our fantastic new portal and access some really great databases, including "Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular musicians since 1990", "Oxford music online" and "Oxford reference" and if you have any questions about using our collections we can go back to the right over here and you can click on the Ask a Librarian box and send us your question. Alright, so let's start our search in the Catalogue search box.

It's best when you start a search, but you, when you, if you don't have an exact search term, if you don't have exact title or author for example, start broadly and then narrow down. So I'm going to do a search for the word "songbook"... Alright and now here I am in the Catalogue and I can see that I have nine hundred and eighty search results. My goodness, um, when I scroll down the list though I can see that some of them are actually books and not music at all... So, how do I get it down to just music in my search results list? Well I can go over to the "narrow search" menu on the right side of the page. "Narrow search" really means that I can just reduce the number of search results shown in my list by making choices about what I want to have shown there. And I make those choices by selecting the links running down the side of the page. So I'm going to select "music" and use a link because I only want to see items that have been catalogued as music, and that reduces the results to 581. Okay we're on our way, but I can already see looking at these sort of preview records that this isn't going to be quite the list I need. At a glance, yes, the format is music but they're all published quite recently. If I look at the dates here and here and here, those dates mean that these works will be, they'll be in part in copyright... Okay and another thing, in our catalogue if an item from our collection has been digitized we would expect to see a thumbnail or a small image of the cover of the work just to the left of the title, and there isn't one here. So I can now say that this is just a list of catalogued items, but they're not items that we can view online.

Okay let's find digitized items. We'll head back... to the narrow search menu and I'm going to go down to this link here, “NLA digital material”, by clicking on this link I'll be able to see items that are held in the library's collection that have been fully digitized and I can see them at home. Alright, let's bring it up and now I'm seeing thumbnails. So that's very encouraging. At a glance though, let's look at the dates. These are all published really quite early, maybe too early for me? So let me see if I can choose to see results for items that were published umm or that were on a subject that's just a little bit later than that. Okay let's go back to narrow search... I could select a number of ways to narrow this search, I could collect, I could click on one of the "decade" links here but I'm actually going to look at the "subject area" just up a bit, I'm going to click on more to open up the list and now I can see that there are many to choose from. Um cataloguers have obviously classified music under many, many subject headings. I'm going to choose this one, “Popular music 1931 to 1940”. The grey “2” afterwards tells me that there are two items that had been classified with that subject. At least that have been digitized... Okay, so now my sub, my list suddenly gets much more specific. Let's look at the first one in the list “Jovial songs”. I'll scroll up again, okay so let's look at some clues in the catalogue record I can see when it was published, I can see how many pages are in the work so it looks like it will contain a good number of songs. I can see a little preview of some of the contents especially Australian specific contents. I can see in the notes field that it's for voice and piano, and down here I can see the subjects that it's associated with. I could click on any one of those subjects, and see more items that have been classified as being related to that subject, but what I'm really interested in is the “Copyright status” button. Um this is one of my favourite things in the catalogue, I use it all the time. Click on it... and hooray it's out of copyright. That's great news. Now the information in this pane is based on the library's copyright status tool, which uses information in the catalogue, for example, the life dates of the creators or contributors to provide an estimate of the work’s copyright status. It's just for general guidance, it's not legal advice but it is a really helpful estimation tool. So this work is out of copyright, and that means you're free to make a copy or perform it in public. We would just ask that you acknowledge the library and I'll include a link for how to do that in our useful links list.

Ok, let's go up again, to the thumbnail. Let's click on it and see what happens. Okay so we're taken to our Trove viewer, viewer. Now we can see its table of contents. I'm going to click the “Zoom in” button to make that a bit bigger so we can see it. Oh it's maybe too big, I can click the “Zoom out” button to make it smaller again but just, there is a good overview of what is, what's contained I could scroll down and see every single page, readily viewable. On the left side of the page I could use some of these links, if I weren't doing research on this kind of music, I could use a cite tool, I could download a low-resolution copy or I could even order a high-resolution copy through our copies direct service but the fantastic thing about digitized materials is that they're readily available wherever you are. Okay and that's the story of finding out of copyright material that you can view at home.

So I'll now hand over to my colleague Sue for question two...

SU: Okay, well, hello everyone. Um, thanks again for dropping by and watching this video with us. My name's Sue and I'm looking at the question of "How to find items in the catalogue?" again as Renee has just done, but this is more specifically about copyright, how to order items that might be in copyright and a little bit about our Symphony Australia collection. So we'll just turn off the video so we can concentrate on the question, because it's quite a big one.

Um the question came from a collector of scores and he's been looking for this version of Stanford's Songs of the Fleet and he couldn't find it anywhere until he stumbled upon a copy in our collection. Stumbling upon music scores could be one of the most common ways that musicians and others find their ways into the library's music collections, usually through general internet searches. They're searching for specific titles or composers, quite often, and then they say that the library's the only place they found this item and now they want to get a copy. The second part of the question is about copyright because the collector knew that the composer died in 1924, and the lyricist in 1938 So why is it not marked as out of copyright and if it is out of copyright how can you get a copy?

So if we go to the catalogue records that he's found... there we go... um. We can see that it is marked as in copyright but he has looked very carefully at the catalogue record and seen the date. So he feels that it should be out of copyright but and just in general, music can be more complex than books regarding copyright because they're often at least two creators, usually including a lyricist as well as the composer. So you have to look at both dates. The copyright status tool shows "in copyright", this is the tool Renee just mentioned because this item is actually a manuscript and because it comes from the Eugene Goossens collection which is in, which is within the Symphony Australia collection.

It does seem a bit complicated but you can see the notes here confirms that it's a Symphony Australia. The Symphony Australia collection comes from the ABC Orchestras. Symphony Australia began with the full-time ABC orchestras and they were used for concerts and radio broadcasts, and were set up later, this was early in the century, in the 30s, I believe and later it was set up as an independent company as part of the ABC. The Symphony Australia Library donated its collection of music scores to the National Library in 2001 and further instalments later as well. So the Eugene Goossens collection of music scores is part of the Symphony Australia collection. Goossens was the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra which was one of the full- time symphony orchestras in each of the capital cities, established by the ABC after the war. So the library is very lucky to get that full collection from them. Goossens’ conductors scores may be heavily annotated by Goossens and in some cases are inscribed by the composer. As such they are catalogued, catalogued as manuscripts, unpublished. So therefore they';re still regarded as "in copyright"... and sometimes we are able to send you, if you ask, ask through Ask a librarian. We might be able to send you a photograph of the first page just so you can see what the condition of the item and what you're going to get if you request a copy of it. So you can see in this case it is this is the first page of the songs of the fleet, the first song "Sailing at dawn" and this is what the item actually looks like obviously used quite heavily by Eugene Goossens... um just because the item is a manuscript and in copyright it doesn't mean that a copy is not available. In many cases the library is authorized to provide copies of donated materials. Orders will be checked for copyright or preservation issues on receipt.

So I'm just going to click through here to the catalogue record and show you how to order a copy.... yes that's huge um right, down to the bottom of the page, this is the the "Songs of the fleet", this is the one we want. All the information is here about the...actual item. The first thing you need to do is click on "order a copy" ... and “Add to Cart". Now you don't have to be a library subscribed, registered reader, to do this because a payment will be involved, but you can order a copy through this and as I say, all the Copies Direct staff will check it for copyright can let you know the outcome if necessary. So in the copies direct form you've got already. Everything's populated up here but you will have to choose "whole item"; or parts of items, especially in music. This is important because sometimes the part might just be string part or the the brass parts you know depending on what's in the music or you might want the whole item so in this case we're going to look for the whole item and you need to put in first the estimated number of pages and it will tell you up here in the description. So it's a manuscript score and has 93 pages. So then in this case you would put 93 pages up here, in this box “Other information” probably not necessary in this case... and as always in Copies Direct form, I say follow the blue buttons. So this one is "add to cart" and this now reminds you of everything that you've requested. So you've requested: “Songs of the fleet”, 5 songs and it's 93 pages and then you can proceed to order details. This page will estimate the cost for you. So you're going to order a document scan or this, a PDF document which will be sent to you via a download. So what the Copies Direct staff will send you is a URL, a web page where you can go and download the item to your own computer, and it's estimated given you the cost here. In this case it's going to be $76 because it's $19 per 25 pages. So you, we've given the number of pages and that's the estimate, the cost. On the next page there will be a declaration of use. This is essential for all copies direct orders. In this case we, as I understand it there was a collector of music who wanted to collect this, this item just for his own record. So he can click “Research, study or personal use” and then he can put in just it's of a personal study or for his collection. Now if you want it for public use, especially for performance you're going to have to put your, your declaration there... If the item is in copyright, we, you will need to send your permission to publish, first to the Copies Direct staff. The contact email for copies direct staff is here.

So if you email the, the copyright holder, they send you your permission to get it published, permission to copy, sorry, and permission to perform, then you can click on this contact up here, and you can see the email that you can forward your permission to and then Copies Direct staff we'll keep that on file. When they receive your order they'll go into that, and you can mention here that you've sent them the permission to publish for public use and that's a permission to publish perform, sorry, and because that's what most musicians want, and then you agree to all the terms and conditions and then proceed to “Review Order. So well I haven't planned on anything so I get the red sign. You have to fill in all those starred places before you can proceed and the pages after that, are just your um credit card details. Your credit card won't be charged until the order is filled and if copies direct staff need to contact you about the order they will before they do anything. So that's how you order a copy.

If I just go back to our home page while I'm in the live site here I'll show you another method that might come up in getting a copy of items. In this case I'm going to look for “String Quartet”, if I can spell it, six by Alfred Hill. Alfred Hill is another Symphony Australia personality, I was going to say, but there is. So we've got two items at "string quartet number six", it comes up right at the top because I knew what I was searching for. So you see this, the second one I'm clicking on, is... this Alfred Hill collection of music scores and parts and it's part of a symphony Australia collection, and this one again sorry I clicked on if I click on copyright status it's In Copyright because it's a manuscript and even though as you can see here it's a manuscript score. If we go back to the search results and click the first result here, we can see that this item has actually been published by Stars Music Publications, 2007, and if you scroll down even further you can see that we've got two copies in the library. So one of these will be available for interlibrary loan. So you, all you need to do then is go to your local library and ask them to help you with filling out all the forms that they need for interlibrary loan. Again there is a cost involved depending on what your library, your local library their procedures... So you can request an interlibrary loan but then if you are requesting something for performances, then up to your, it's your responsibility then to obtain any permission necessary for performance. So you can get the copy of the music but then you will have to adhere to any copyright regulations before you actually use it, publish it or perform it.

So if I go back to the PowerPoint while we're talking about copyright, the way to find permissions for performance for Australian and New Zealand music is to go to APRA AMCOS. APRA ANCOS is the website for all Australian and New Zealand music and they can help to find copyright owners. There's a link here were you can contact us in their website. I won't click through to the website today, but you can find that. In that link there's, there's a another set, another link to if you particularly want copyright permissions they can help you find the owner.

Also the Australian copyright Council gives, helps with general questions about your legal responsibilities regarding copyright. Including duration of copyright, tips on finding copyright owners and you can check for copyright rules. Because it's legal and it can be complex. So that's a good way to find some, some answers. In fact you click on “Find an answer” for all those help tips on the Australian copyright council.

So if we just, quickly to finish off, go back to Symphony Australia. Another part of Symphony Australia is the Australian collection of concert tours, touring schedules. This is the artist itineraries and so on for those ABC concerts... that were broadcast on radio and... well it tells you here, “historic set of typescripts of ABC artists touring schedules, from 1933 to 1937”. The itineraries include dates and places for individual tours and names of performers with annotated notes indicating cancelled or changed arrangements and memos you can see whether they went by boat or train or hop which city they flew to and all the dates associated with particular artists. Some Australian artists, a lot of overseas artists, came in for the concerts as well. The schedules had been digitized and you just click on the dates you're looking for. Under here you see, oops went too far, oh dear, because I can't see records in this collection that will be finding the tours, there they are there. As you've already had a preview... So just quickly I was looking for this particular... schedule here because there was a musicologist looking for information about the final solo recitals of William Kapell. Just before a plane crash, the schedule shows the final concerts in October the twenty, October 22nd, in Geelong, in 1953. Unfortunately the Library doesn't hold a program for the concert but the University of Melbourne has a collection which may include it. So we could forward that information to him but here we can at least see the date and where the concert was held, and we can also use Trove as you probably know all about Trove newspapers, but here we, we found the concert that was actually broadcast on October the 22nd live from the Plaza theater in Geelong and William Kapell played sonata, opus, Chopin's sonata opus 35. So that gave us a little bit more information about that after checking the schedules from ABC. So that's about all I have on Symphony Australia.

RE: Thanks so much Sue. That's terrific. There have been some questions coming in while we've been speaking. One of them touches on the issue of this estimation, sort of estimation

tools for copyright. So I'm just going to show an image. I'm just going to go back to one of our catalogue records. They’re in all of the catalogue records, anything that has a status, a “Copyright status” button attached to it. We just click on this.... Ok we can see our “In Copyright” status there. Let's go down now to this link “How copyright status is determined” to see a flowchart. This is a very rough, no, well it's a, it's an approximate rule of thumb. It's not legal advice but it shows you at a glance how the, the catalogue is arriving at that status. So you can see that in any catalogue record and that's just to, that's just to help you, but in general we would direct people to the Australian Copyright Council. I'm just going to a search for their website now... Australian Copyright Council and to find music specific information I would go to “Find an Answer”, “Search for an answer” and in this box I would just type in “music”, and that will bring up many more information sheets that have a bit more detailed information about music and copyright because it is a really complex answer, a question and so we're not, you know it's really up to the researcher to find that themselves. SU: Can we just go back to the copyright tool?

RE: Yes which I don't know where is now. It's over here. This one.

SU: Oh lost it.

RE: Ok, yeah, that's it.

SU: This one?

RE: Yeah that's it. When it tells you at the bottom here. The Copyright status may, may not be correct, if the record is incomplete. So what the status tool is taking, it's information from the dates that it sees in the catalogue. So it can only take the, the copyright date from the date that's available. If, if the date is not available, if there's a question mark after the date, it will be made as in copyright.

SU: Or copyright undetermined. So you do have to go through, maybe find a little bit more information.

RE: And that's why your example was so helpful, just to tease out some of those complexities.

SU: Yeah, yeah.

RE: Okay well thank you so much Sue. Okay well I think that that's all the questions we have at the moment. But we'll just hand over to our next presenter, our colleague, Rachel...

RA: Hello everyone, my name is Rachel and I'm gonna just talk us through the third question that we had which is, "How do I find musical entries to the Australian national anthem quest held by the Australian Council for the Arts in 1973?" and the second part of the question is "Why did the judges, John Hopkins, Peter Sculthorpe, Don Burrows and Maria Prerauer decide that none of the entries were good enough to be the country's anthem?" This question is a really good example of the type of broader research questions that we often get asked but do relate to the music collection, but also can involve researching other collection areas in the library. So we’ll just turn off the video now so that we can work through this question.

So to give it a little bit of a background to start with. In 1973 the Australian Council for the Arts held the Australian national anthem quest competition to find both the lyrics and the music for a new national anthem. The competition was actually held in two p arts. They received more than two and a half entries for the lyrics which was the first part, followed by 1300 entries for music and none of those were actually chosen. So as I've kind of mentioned the question is really a two-part question: the first part is looking for musical entries to the competition; while the second part wants to find out why none of them were chosen as the anthem?

So a good place to start with actually finding any of the musical entries held here at the library, is to go to the catalogue. So if we go back to our home page, a simple place to start is just to actually put the search into the search box here, and for this I'm just going to use the keywords “national anthem quest”. I'm just go and search. Okay so we can see from there that there are actually six results, so that's not too many to actually have to work through. We can at a glance get some sort of idea of what's actually available. Now the first entry here the “Australian national anthem quest”, which is music obviously looks promising but before I'm going to actually follow through that trail I'm going to have a bit of a closer look first at the other search results because it may actually be quite easy just to eliminate those to start with.

So a couple that catch my eye is, there's one here that says “Lyrics 1973” and another one that says “Lyrics 1973”, which are manuscripts material and if we click on them and open up the catalogue record, we can find out a little bit more information. So opening up that first one, it actually in the summary tells us that these were words for the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory” and was submitted for the National Anthem Quest. So people are allowed to submit lyrics to existing tunes in that lyrics competition part of the quest.

So if we go back, obviously looking at that we can see it's not a musical entry and chances are when we go on to this one. Down the bottom, by Ruth Clark, we will see that these Australian words for the tune of "God save the Queen" and again as it mentions Australian national anthem quest, we can be fairly safe and assuming that they would for the lyrics competition. So if we go back to our first to our six results and have another look at some of the others, these two entries here, they're both Music, well that's manuscripts but it's musical scores, this is music with the same composer, Bradley Riley. So we'll just go into have a look at this one which is “God bless this land” and this actually tells us it's a manuscript score and it was an entry in the Australian national anthem quest in 1973, it's for voice and piano, so it's obviously it's music, it's music and words, words of music by Bradley Riley so we've actually here found one of the entries for the musical competition.

If we go back to the entry for the musical scores by the same composer, we can see in summary that it includes an entry in the Australian national anthem quest titled "God bless this land" which confirms what we were looking at before. So that's really just saying that we hold two copies of this particular entry to the competition. So just heading back once more. Oh not that far. We'll just go into there and open up my six results again. The last entry down here if you want to have a quick look, it's the papers of Donald Wakeling. So they’re manuscripts material. So we're just going to have a quick click in there and we can see in the summary again that these papers do relate to national anthems and a quest for the Australian national anthem but they cover the years 1941 to 1960, including an article that he wrote in a periodical. There's no mention of any musical works as such, so I think from this you can probably assume this is not really relevant for the 1973 competition.

So going back, just to the first entry that we found, the Australian National Anthem Quest if we click open on that one, we can see that it's actually a commemorative album and it's for voice and piano. So an album of sheet music if you like and with the title that it's got, that it's a commemorative album. It's obviously an album for the quest itself. Unfortunately it doesn't give us the contents. So we haven't got a record, list of individual songs in the album. So we could of course request the item from the stack area and view it in our Special Collections Reading Room, if we wanted to see the full contents and obviously if you're interested in actually reading the music itself you would have to do this. It's not digitized, it's not available online, but there is another option that we can try if we're just trying to maybe find a list of contents. The other option is to search Trove. As Sue and others have mentioned, you probably all familiar with Trove, but it does include records for items held in libraries and institutions across Australia and these records can include different amounts of information. So it's possible that we may find some extra information if we go into Trove.

So we're just going to the Trove homepage. I am going to choose the Music, Sound and Video subset because at the moment I'm only interested in searching the music items and that one that we're looking for, the “Commemorative Album”, was a music item. So I'm just going to put in a search in here. I'm going to put it in quotes because Trove is such a much larger database if you like. I'm trying to not bring up too many superfluous results and so I can narrow it down by actually just searching on the phrase itself... So I having done that, we can see that there's actually five entries, five results, the top two relate to this Commemorative Album by George S. English. “God bless his land” is also there but if we click on the first one, “Australian National Anthem Quest” and there's more than one edition too but if I click on the first edition and scroll down I can actually see there is a list of contents which includes entries to the competition as well as three already established songs. So without actually viewing the item we are able to see a list of contents, and find the titles and composers of some of the entries to the competition.

So from our search of the library's catalogue it's apparent that the library doesn't hold all 1,300 musical entries, no surprise there, but as can often be the case it's not always possible to find everything that you're looking for. However we have established that the library has a number of musical entries, namely those in the Commemorative Album, and the song "God bless this land". So I'm just going to move on now to the second part of this question which was why I did before judges, decided not to choose any of the musical entries. So assuming that the competition would have received press attention at the time, we, I'm trying to find newspaper articles which might shed light on the judge's decision. Trove includes a subset of digitized Australian newspapers, most of you are probably familiar with that. Coverage is mainly up to and including 1954, due to copyright limitations. However the library was given permission to digitize some titles for later years, including the Canberra Times.

So back in Trove I'm going to just click on where it says "digitized newspapers and more". Just so we can have the search of there. So we're still searching under this "national anthem quest" phrase. We've got 28 results but if I want to I can actually narrow these down further by using the limiters on the left hand sides of the page here. So to start with I might just drop down to where it says decade, and I'm going to choose 1970-79, and then within that I can actually narrow it down further to 1973, which was the year in which the crest was held. I'm also going to remove the “Advertising”, because that's not going to tell me a great deal and I'm just looking for the articles... Now I've actually left myself with the “Advertising”, I don't want to do that. Okay let's go back. We want the articles, alright so now I've just got a result of five, which is much more manageable, and having a quick glance down there, I can see that the second result says “Familiar tune to be new anthem”. Looks like a promising result. So if I click on that link and open it up, I can actually read the article itself and just power for it or just basically going through what it says there, it quotes the chairman of the Quest Subcommittee as saying "in the opinion of the judges, none of the anthems submitted reached a high standard already set by such familiar songs as Waltzing Matilda, Advance Australia Fair and Some of Australia. Since the Australian government has made it clear from the outset that these songs would be considered, the judges have recommended that the choice of the anthem should be between these three familiar and established songs.

So that may be a sufficient answer to our second part of my question, namely why the judges did not choose any of the musical entries, however if we wanted to we could try to find out a bit more and one way we could do this would be to investigate if the library holds the personal papers of any of the four judges. Our manuscript collections include a wide variety of unpublished material, including letters, musical scores photographs and so on. I know we've just touched on it already slightly so I'm going to just go back and I'm actually going to go into the catalogue here, by clicking on the link and I'm going to search for one of the judges and you'll see what we have and I'm going to choose these “Add limits”, I'm going to choose from here “manuscript” because I'm just after personal papers. They're going to be in the manuscript collections, I'm going to go find and we get one: it's the papers of Curt and Marea Prerauer and if we open that up we can also see when we scroll down that luckily for this there is a summary, but there's also an online finding aid, which is really handy for large collections such as this and you can access those by clicking on the link and it gives you a really good detailed view. It opens it up in the Trove viewer and we're able to scroll through and actually get much more of an idea of what's actually held in this collection and we can see there, scrolling through, if we go down to series 9, it includes her papers on Australian art bodies 1971 to 96 and we are looking for something relating to the Australian Council for the Arts, for 1973 and if we go down a little bit farther, further within series 9, we can see that it includes “correspondents and cuttings relating to the Australian Council for the Arts 1973” and up here it says it includes “correspondence regarding the Australian national anthem quest”.

So we can see that's going to be useful but as is often the case with certain research the more you dig the more you can end up with questions rather than answers. I actually requested this item to look at in the Special Collections Reading Room and found a folder that includes several relevant press clippings, which all provided the same information as that found in the Canberra Times article but which also lists the four judges involved and interestingly they all named Ernest Llewellyn rather than John Hopkins at a judge, however also within the same folder, in the same papers, there was a Commonwealth government printed pamphlet which includes the top six lyric entries chosen by the four judges and in the forward written by Manning Clarke, he lists the four judges for the forthcoming music competition and included John Hopkins rather than Ernest Llewellyn. So as I say it's created the question of was it John Hopkins or Ernest Lewellyn who was the fourth music judge for the competition. Unfortunately at this time we're not going to go any further down that rabbit hole otherwise we could be here for a hell of lot longer but it is something, it's when you're doing research you have to know when to stop. But in another time if you wanted to you could continue research in the library and the papers. We do hold the papers for both Ernest Llewellyn and John Hopkins and indeed for the other judges involved in the competition, but for now though we know that the library holds some of the musical entries to the 1973 Australian national anthem quest, but none of the entries were chosen because they were judged to not reach the standard a familiar existing songs already under consideration.

RE: Thank you so much Rachel. We'll now hand over to Scotia for our final question for today.

SC: Thank You Rachel. I'm Scotia, a reference librarian here and I will take you through the fourth question today. It's going to be short and sweet. We shouldn't be too far over the two o'clock deadline. Now we'll just turn off the video... Okay, so, "I'd like to find the words and music of Molly Riley, I read in the book "Battling for gold" by John Marshall that he witnessed this song being sung at a political rally in Kalgoorlie in 1902. I've tried to find the words to Molly Riley but have not been successful. I'd very much like to obtain copy.”

Okay, I started by searching our catalogue for Molly Riley as the first port of call but didn't really see anything like specific sheet music. So I also repeated this search in Trove. I was able to find several notices in the newspaper zone about the song appearing in the Christmas annual song books for both Nicholson's and Palings. So I went back to our library catalogue to search for Palings Christmas annual. You see I've just highlighted in the middle useful information about Palings and co. Christmas annual number 13, which comes back to be a useful snippet. So here's the catalogue record for the Christmas annual and on this next slide you can see that it was marked as being digitized. This means I can click this blue text here and see the digital copies. We have digitized several editions of both of these journals but unfortunately the year I was after had not been digitized but thanks to Trove for telling me that I was after number 13 of palings Christmas annual, I rechecked our catalogue holdings.

So there's back to the catalogue and down the bottom, perfectly number 13, 1896. I requested this material up and after it being delivered to our Special Collections Reading Room, this is what it looks like. So from this catalogue record the enquirer can now select “Order a copy” and have it sent to them by mail or email through our copies direct service and on these, all of these music magazines we had a listing of all of the songs, Molly Riley's up there but she's down the back on page 26. Now also in our catalogue a search for “Molly Riley” brought up an oral history recording. This is part of the Rob Willis folklore collection and Maysie Tucker was recorded at 15 times as part of this collection. Luckily they have listed the songs talked about or sung within the the recording and Molly Riley was returned in this catalogue record. So this recording has been digitized and this is an online logo, shows us that we can click on through and listen to the material. So I'm just going to say yes to the “terms and conditions” and this one doesn't have the time summary like a lot of them do. I serendipitously managed to click on 9:20 on playlists, and pretty much clicked right on it by accident. So we're just going to listen to a small part of Molly Riley. [singing]

Okay so even though we don't have the lyrics to that song, but we do have the tunes... Now we'd also seen that what was in the oral history recording was different to the printed music. Molly Riley is a, obviously a popular title. So we've got that variation there for our... we'll send all of these links and this information to the enquirer and they can make a decision about which version was actually sung in Kalgoorlie in 1902.

RENEE: That's great. Thanks so much Scotia. Well and now, do we have any questions? It looks like it's all quiet on the question front at the moment. So I'll just close, we're very close to time. I’d just like to say thank you again so much to everyone who sent in their questions and for listening so carefully today. As I mentioned before we are recording today's session and we've also recorded many sessions in the past. If you have an interest in one of our past topics we have many more than are appearing here, but these are ready to watch right now on our YouTube channel... and if you have any further questions that you think of after today's session, please use our Ask a Librarian service. Thank you again so much for attending today. Thank you to Sue, Rachel and Scotia for their great work. Well that's all for now this is our final webinar for 2019 but don't worry we're all hard at work on new webinars for 2020. So until next year happy researching!

End of transcript.