Library

The Trento Conservatoire’s library has a relatively recent history. It was created, in fact, with the nationalisation of the Gianferrari music high school, which in 1980 became the Bonporti Conservatoire and acquired its entire bibliographic heritage of approximately 5000 volumes and 200 vinyl records.
“The origin of this first nucleus is varied. A large part came from the Philharmonic Society, the founding and managing body of the Music School, which became the Liceo musicale in 1905. The first acquisitions undoubtedly date back to the early 1900s, when the didactic direction was entrusted to Vincenzo Gianferrari. […] Until the 1940s, the library’s collection increased modestly; it was not until the post-war period”[1] under municipal management that the collections saw a significant increase thanks to new acquisitions, as well as important bequests, donations and transfers from other libraries. Among the bequests from that period, particular mention should be made of Benvenuto Disertori’s (800 units) and Luigi Pigarelli’s (550 units), not only because of their size, but also because they constitute an important trace of their intellectual and artistic biography. The increase in the bibliographic assets recorded up to the 1980s was, however, limited almost exclusively to printed music, with purchases mainly aimed at teaching instrumental music.
It was not until 1987, with the establishment of the music-oriented high school and the funds allocated, from then on annually, by PAT, that purchases were significantly oriented towards texts of scientific and musicological interest. “The library expanded the section on early music with many treatises in anastatic editions, the reference section with repertories, encyclopaedias, monumenta, opera omnia”[2] and the record section. This “encouraged greater use of the service by high school students in particular”[3]. Over the course of these years, donations from publishers and private individuals also contributed significantly to the increase in the collections, including in 1998 the donation of 150 scores by contemporary Italian composers by Ricordi and Suvini Zerboni and the Menestrina donation with around 300 audio cassettes and 70 video cassettes. Subscriptions to specialised journals also saw a significant increase in this period, amounting to some 30-40 titles.
Law 508 of 1999, which transformed the conservatoires into “higher institutes of musical studies”[4] and established their tasks within the university sector, defining them as “primary centres of higher education, specialisation and research in the artistic and musical sector [which] carry out related production activities”[5], gave further impetus to the strengthening of the library’s endowments and services in order to make them increasingly functional to the institution of which it is a part. From the 2000s to the present day, the library entered a phase of radical transformation, which involved the collections, with a substantial increase in inventory, but above all cataloguing and services with the acquisition, among other things, of access to the most important online databases for research.
The first critical issue to be addressed was the inadequacy of the opening hours and access to services, which until 2000 was ten hours a week[6], totally insufficient for a specialised library of a university institution. At first, this was dealt with by allowing the opening hours to be extended with an assignment to an administrative assistant, until it reached 36 hours per week as of 2007, guaranteed by a stable working relationship with a specialist librarian. Important innovations affected cataloguing, including the computer-based creation of a new topographical catalogue that is richer in bibliographical information and, particularly with regard to printed music, accessible by type of performance. Online cataloguing in Cbt and Opac Bonporti was also started in these years. In addition, in order to better adapt the library to the most modern standards of bibliographic research, access was acquired to Oxford Music Online in 2006 and to Jstor and Rilm in 2015.
From 2003 to 2015, the average increase in collection was around 500 bibliographic units per year. The most important donations in this period were in 2013 the Bardotti bequest (several thousand CDs currently being catalogued) and in 2015 the donation of the Centro Studi Antoniani of Padua (20 volumes from the Corpus Musicum Franciscanum) and the Curti donation (several hundred monographs and scores from the Wolf-Proclemer bequest, currently being catalogued).
In more recent years, the purchases proposed by the departments have shown a gradual decrease in paper-based material, while there has been a significant increase in computer-based material, subscriptions to online journals and access to specialised databases.
Currently, the library has its highest bibliographic coverage in the areas of didactics and instrumental performance, composition, new technologies, choral conducting and music education, psychology and music pedagogy, where it reaches or approaches level 4[7] (research support). This is made possible above all by the collaboration of the faculties, which annually propose the purchase of the most recent publications of didactic and scientific interest related to their subject areas and related inter- and trans-disciplinary fields, thus enabling the library to keep the bibliographic coverage of the collections supporting academic teaching and scientific research constantly up-to-date.
In order to make the interaction between the library and the Conservatoire even more direct and efficient and the library’s response to the needs of students and lecturers more prompt, with the adoption of new regulations in 2015, the Library Council was established, consisting of the director, the administrative director, a lecturer’s representative, a student representative and the librarian lecturer who chairs it.
The library of the Laboratory of Musical Philology of the Department of Humanities and Philosophy and the library of the Conservatoire are the two most important specialised libraries for supporting musical and musicological research in our area and manifest a necessarily complementary vocation. The former, in fact, provides an almost complete bibliographic coverage of critical editions and music opera omnia, while the latter ensures a high bibliographic coverage in the areas more specifically related to its teaching, research and music production activities. Between the university and, in particular, between the Laboratory of Music Philology and the Conservatoire, there has long been a relationship of collaboration at various levels. In particular, since 2014, as part of the course in Tools and Methods of Bibliographic Research, students from the Conservatoire who are interested in research visit the Laboratory of Musical Philology every year, where they meet the researchers and technicians working there, who explain its operation, the services it offers and the collections in the laboratory library.
It is with this complementarity in mind and in the hope of an ever-increasing integration of the bibliographic assets and services between the two libraries that the Conservatoire Library defines the general guidelines for its development, i.e.: the continuous updating of the bibliographic coverage in areas where it has already reached or is close to reaching level 4[7], the extension of the same standard to other areas, the updating of the online catalogue and the expansion of the range of available services.
The research activities that the higher institutes of music studies are engaged in, like all research activities today, make use of an increasingly articulated and complex system of networks. This implies an increasing degree of openness and interconnection. The vocation of a library supporting research is therefore necessarily to be a node in these networks. For this reason, the library opens up to the university world and to the local area, extending all its services to external users, who, with the adoption of the new regulations, are put on an equal footing with internal users.
Piervito Malusà, November 2015.

[1] TARCISIO CHINI, La biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica “F.A. Bonporti” di Trento in Non solo storia, Trento, Conservatoire of Music “F.A. Bonporti”, 2001, pp. 51-62: 56. Anyone wishing to further study the history of the Tridentine Conservatoire’s library from its foundation to the year 2000 can request the aforementioned volume – currently out of print – from the library.
[2] Ibidem, p. 57
[3] Ivi
[4] Law No. 508 of 21 December 1999, Art 2
[5] Ibidem, art. 4
[6] Cfr. TARCISIO CHINI, La biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica “F.A. Bonporti” di Trento cit., p. 61
[7] Estimation using the Conspectus scale – Western Library Network variant. This method employs a numerical scale (continuum) from 1 to 5 to assess the level of bibliographic coverage of a collection: 1 = minimal level, 2 = basic level, 3 = teaching support level, 4 = research support level, 5 = total (or nearly total) bibliographic coverage.