Shared notes for this sessionIn 2009, music librarians from the seven academic institutions of the Borrow Direct library resource sharing partnership began mapping out a cooperative collection development plan for purchasing scores of contemporary composers. Ten years later, the consortium of libraries has evolved into the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC), comprising thirteen academic research libraries with a robust governance system overseeing multiple cooperative initiatives. During this time, the IPLC Music Librarians Group has formalized its cooperative collection development agreement and expanded the coverage and scope to include at least one participating institution collecting close to 2,000 globally based contemporary composers, and more recently adding younger emerging composers and increasing the percentage of women and composers of diverse backgrounds. As an extension of the cooperative collection development agreement, the group launched in 2014 an ambitious, Columbia-based initiative: the Contemporary Composers Web Archive. The project’s goal is to image and preserve established and changing website content of eminent contemporary composers in a secure digital archive to assure future availability of this potentially ephemeral data to researchers and scholars. The archive now contains nearly 1,000 composer websites, for which catalog records are available in OCLC for download into local systems. In this panel session, six members of the Ivy Plus Music Librarians Group will present a 10-year anniversary retrospective overview, describe how the group developed its collaborative agreement, highlight current initiatives, and provide the perspective of a new member to the group on becoming challenged with acclimating quickly to a large and complex cooperative collection initiative. Although the original goal of the IPLC music agreement was not to save money but to increase the breadth of works collected, librarians faced with budgetary challenges while managing collection development and those considering consortia
