World Book & Copyright Day 2012 #WorldBookDay

LIASA poster: World Book Day 2012

Read Embrace Tomorrow

Today is World Book Day! It is a day of reflection and reading of books.

UNESCO describes the theme as a specific focus on books and translation this year:

"23 April is a symbolic date for world literature for on this date in 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors such as Maurice Druon, Haldor K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo.
It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference, held in Paris in 1995, to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity. In this respect, UNESCO created both the World Book and Copyright Day and the UNESCO Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance.
The year 2012 also marks the 80th anniversary of the Index Translationum. This international bibliography of translation provides a unique tool for the monitoring of translation flows in the world. UNESCO will celebrate this anniversary by organizing a debate on this instrument."

                                                            - UNESCO World Book Day 

Read more about the background of World Book Day.

The message from the Director-General of UNESCO can be found here, and there are resources available on the UNESCO website.
The events of World Book Day 2012 that have been planned around the world are listed as well.

The Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) has made a poster available (see above), but unfortunately it seems that there are no specific events planned for today that's listed!

How should we celebrate this day?
Should we still reflect on the importance of books?
What about e-books and the proliferation of reading in the digital sphere?


Blog post by Karen du Toit, Afrikaans Archivist in the SABC Radio Archives.

Musings in the Music Library #5 - Copyright

Another vignette in a series that was sent by a fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library.

"Copyright is for the protection of the creator, an esoteric subdivision of legalities that makes Peace in the Middle East quite straightforward by comparison.  

As an introduction, South Africa and Canada recognize copyright as Death (of the creator, author, composer etc) plus Fifty years.  The European Union is now Death + 70, and the United States, in some applications and from certain dates, is Death + 90.  Even if you are a South African entity (like CPO) and you want to hire something out of copyright in South Africa for performance in South Africa, you may have to pay copyright because the Country of Origen of the Hired Material has a longer post-death law in place.  After this, it gets really complicated.  

For those audience members who despair at the relative lack of “modern” (that is, post 1930) music in concert programmes, I do ask that they judge CPO not too harshly.  

At time of writing the average fee for hiring copyright music is R300 per performance minute plus VAT plus Air Freight (usually from the UK), and that is just too expensive.  

Even if all the composers considered are long passed away, their publishing heirs can price their works right off the concert platform."

Related posts:

Musings in the Music Library #4

Musings in the Music Library #3

Musings in the Music Library #2

Musings in the Music Library #1

SABC Record Library - photo account of a Wednesday afternoon

SABC Record Library 

Acquisition in the SABC Music Library - Paiste crotales

The SABC Music Librarian, Suzette Lombard, of the SABC Music Library, wrote this short piece on the acquisition of Paiste Crotales in the music library:

The Music Library recently acquired a new set of 30 Paiste crotales, ranging from C6 (8va above middle C) to F8. These swiss-made music instruments are small, chromatically-tuned brass disks which have a clear and sustained, bell-like sound.

Crotales are also known as antique cymbals, as they have been used in some form or other since ancient times, often as smaller finger cymbals struck together by dancers. At present they are usually struck with hard mallets, or played with a bow, which produces an eerie sound similar to a glass-harmonica.


Composers such as Claude Debussy, Joseph Schwantner and Igor Stravinsky have used it to great effect in their compositions. In 1970, Karlheinz Stockhausen used it extensively in his composition Mantra, written for two ring-modulated pianos, wood blocks and two sets of specific crotales. In popular music, Mike Oldfield also uses crotales in Clear Light on his album Tubular Bells ll.

Musings in the Music Library #4 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Fellow librarian, Daniel Neal
- from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

"The standard title of where I work is the CPO Library, although this is for convenience.  What was the CTSO collection is owned by the Cape Orchestra Trust, and what was CAPAB’s still belongs to Artscape.  

The CTSO part is one of the oldest collections in South Africa, dating from 1913 the founding year of the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra, whereas CAPAB didn’t start their collection until 1971, when the Artscape building was finished.  But the antiquity of the CTSO collection is not just from purchases beginning from 1913.  

There are many score and parts sets that are much older; undocumented and impossible to ever discover their origins, I just speculate on how they ever got here. Even more, for some repertoire, why:  there are works here that never were popular enough to justify purchase.
 
My favorite to date are the Symphony no. 3 and the Cello Concerto of Joachim Raff, both unopened, unmarked and unplayed sets, first editions dating from around 1875.  

The stories of how and why they got from Berlin to Cape Town are long lost now, but nonetheless intriguing."    

Part of a series of posts.



Related posts:

Musings in the Music Library #1

Musings in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Musings in the Music Library #3 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Musings in the Music Library #3 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Another vignette in a series which was sent by  fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library, in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

An orchestra library is not a place of research or reference, although it does have certain capacities in that medium.  

I’ll get an email from some unknown in Australia who is looking for data concerning their great grandfather who played double bass in the Cape Town Orchestra in the 20s…or was it the 30s?  Can I provide them with anything?  And I can’t, unfortunately.  

To a lesser extent I will be asked for recordings of certain works, and very rarely some musicological question (although Google and Wikipedia seem to have taken up a lot of this in the last ten years).  

In essence the Library is there to provide scores and parts for specific performances.  

The easy bit is to pull the file boxes off the shelves and load the parts folders.  The hard bit is to find, somehow and with limited budget, musical material that the Library doesn’t have!"

Related posts:


Musing in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library 

Musings in the Music Library #1

Musings in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

The following vignette was sent by a fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

"The CPO Library is a rather complex entity, a partially combined form of what had been the CAPAB Library and the CTSO Library that was a result of the merger in 1997 of the then two orchestras of Cape Town.  

Each collection was (and still is) catalogued in its own manner and wasn’t (and still isn’t) cross-indexed.  

On taking up the post of Orchestra Librarian in April 2001 I was immediately lost and often plagued with questions of availability that I was unable to answer; the worst of these coming from people who wanted to know if I had such and such an aria from such and such opera.  Or worse, often a query stated as “you know, THAT aria, for a tenor, I think… maybe Verdi?”  

As it was not quite Hell, but bordering on it, I thought it appropriate to put up a few lines in the plaque that is on the front door.  In Italian, for the benefit, mostly, of those who need arias by yesterday, the lines are from the Divine Comedy. As Dante passes through the gate of Hell, he sees an inscription, the final line of which is the famous phrase

“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, or “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”.  

To date, not one of the opera aria demanding sorts have ever noticed this, let alone considered and commented upon it."

Related post: 
Musings in the music library #1

The value of internship in the SABC Radio Archives

Obakeng Phiri, a sound engineer, completed his internship at the SABC Radio Archives on Friday.
He has been with the SABC Media Libraries for longer than a year!

He answers a question about the value of archives and what he has learnt while being here.

He makes a very worthwhile analogy of archives being "the keepers of our ancestors!"

Best of wishes to all our interns for their next endeavours!


Related posts:

Interview with the intern in the SABC Radio Archives: Obakeng Phiri

Saying goodbye to the intern at the SABC Radio Archives