UWM’s Golda Meir Library Hosts Massive Music Collection

Tucked away on the second floor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, the university’s inconspicuous music collection hosts tens of thousands of scores, books and vinyl records for students and faculty to check out. Although the majority of the campus’ student body may be unaware of it, the collection is a treasure trove of musical media that lies right under their noses.

“There are a couple of different roles for the collection,” said music and performing arts librarian Anna Grau Schmidt. “We try to collect in the areas that are going to get used by students either in the classroom or in their own performances, and to some degree for faculty research.”

Materials from the collection are also often used for student performance ensembles. “A lot of our books came from our library,” said Kamila Gutierrez, a sophomore student at UWM who performs in the university’s Alto Voce choir. “A lot of musical scores, a lot of vocal rep.”

The physical collection itself lies within the east wing of the library’s second floor, with the music literature section spanning an overwhelming amount of shelves. Vinyl records are kept in a separate, locked room near the rest of the collection, while CDs are stored in media reserves elsewhere in the library. Schmidt estimates that there are roughly 40,000 music scores, 30,000 vinyl records and 15,000 CDs in the collection today. “I’m not actually sure of the book collection size,” said Schmidt, “I haven’t looked at the number recently – but it’s in the tens of thousands.” 

“We get a lot of people who do check out records,” said Gutierrez, who also works at the library’s circulation desk. “A lot of people checking out musical scores, I feel like that’s the main thing I check out at the desk. Definitely a lot of memoirs and biographies by famous musicians and composers is something else I see. I mean, it’s something that people make a lot of use out of.” 

Along with the main collection of materials, the library also possesses several special musical collections that cannot be found anywhere else in the country. “Forty years ago, somebody gave us $100,000,” said Schmidt, “but designated that it could only be spent on music from Slovenia. That was before Slovenia existed as a country, but it was an ethnic identity within Latvia at that point. So we still collect a lot of music from Slovenia, and because of that project, we’ve ended up with some older and some more rare things that are from Slovenia that are in our special collections – as well as being sort of the one place in the U.S. that you can get a lot of contemporary music by Slovenian composers.”

However, the collection also offers many resources to those who are not studying music or performing arts. “You can also just use it for fun,” said Schmidt. “We have a lot of CDs, we have a lot of vinyl records, we have a lot of equipment for playing CDs and vinyl records – so if you don’t have that equipment already, you can check that out as well. We have popular nonfiction books about music, books that you don’t have to be a music major to follow. So there’s a lot that you could use to engage with music as a hobby, as well.”

The collection provides a structural framework for many music-related programs at UWM, not limited to those intended for music students. “I study religion and philosophy, but I have been singing in choirs since I was a freshman in high school,” said Gutierrez, who considers herself a hobbyist when it comes to music and performance. “It’s just something that tends to kind of be a respite during the day when there’s a lot of different things being thrown at you in your classes. I feel like singing is just something that helps me to kind of turn my brain off in a good way, but still keeps me connected to my creative self.”

The materials in the music collection can be checked out by students, staff, faculty and those who pay a $50 yearly fee as part of the library’s Community Borrower program. All of the collection’s materials can also be searched for on the library’s online catalog.

“There’s a lot of equipment and spaces and services the library offers,” said Schmidt. “I think people can often be really collection-focused – and our collections are great, but they only make sense because of all of the services and everything that we have around them.”