Music Collections at the 2026 IAML Congress

Blog series Music

Author Music Collections

The 75th Annual Congress of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) was held at Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Greece, between 28 June and 3 July 2026. This year, four members of the Library’s Music Collections team were present, and this blog post gives a brief overview of what they were up to.

Rupert Ridgewell completed his second congress as President of IAML, so had a very busy schedule chairing meetings, delivering speeches, and contributing to various committees and working groups. He also took part in a panel discussion on the importance of a music library in a musician's career, highlighting the vital role played by libraries in the musical ecosystem, even as access to digital scores continues to proliferate. This year there was particular cause for celebration with the Congress marking 75 years of IAML, 60 years of RILM, and 10 years of the Greece branch of IAML. These occasions were aptly marked by a 75th birthday cake (pictured below), an evening reception hosted by RILM on the waterfront of the Aegean Sea, and the superb hosting of the Greek branch and the Congress’s local organising committee.

Loukia Drosopoulou and Irene Diamantouli presented a paper about Greek music manuscripts in the Oliver Neighbour collection at the British Library, MS Mus. 1810 — a remarkable collection of over 200 autograph music manuscripts by various composers ranging from the 16th to the 20th century. This collection was the private collection of the former music librarian at the British Library and musicologist Oliver Wray Neighbour (1923-2015) which he bequeathed to the Library. You can find out more about Oliver Neighbour in this blogpost marking what would have been his 100th birthday in 2023. The Greek manuscripts in his collection are two manuscripts of Nikos Skalkottas, and one manuscript of Manolis Kalomiris. Loukia discussed aspects of the manuscripts’ provenance and transmission history, while Irene offered a brief introduction to the historical and socio-political context in which the works were created, highlighting how competing notions of Greekness have informed their interpretation and reception.

Frankie Perry gave a paper on recent steps forward in Non-Print Legal Deposit music collecting at the Library, focusing on the development of a new portal for smaller publishers to upload digital scores and metadata, and on the initial steps she has been taking in engaging self-publishing composers, arrangers, and editors and small independent publishers with the Legal Deposit process. Frankie contributed to the National Libraries Working Group’s meeting on the topic of cyber-security, where she shared some of the findings and outcomes of the Library’s published report about its 2023 cyber-attack. She also presented a poster on Elgar’s postcards (PDF, 12.7 MB), which is work she is pursuing as part of her role on the University of Oxford’s Elgar’s Themes Project, for which the Library is a key partner.

This annual meeting of music librarians from around the world always features a busy schedule of papers across several parallel sessions, meaning it’s hard to choose what to attend! This year, there was a variety of papers addressing AI-related topics – including questions around how AI-assisted music might accurately be catalogued, case studies of Multimodal Large Language Model-assisted workflows to address cataloguing and conversion backlogs, and a more general panel aimed at demystifying aspects of generative AI – alongside a lot of break-time discussion about the potentials, challenges and dangers of AI in music library contexts. The Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) 2026 conference added considerable interest to the congress, and it is always a great addition to the programme when it coincides with IAML. Papers of particular interest to Music Libraries this year included how digital tools can be used to extract information from historical concert programmes, and in the development of digital critical editions.

Another theme that ran throughout the week was on Greek music libraries and musical sources. Largely thanks for the work of the IAML-Greece branch and RISM-Greece, this last decade has seen tremendous progress in the documentation of Greek musical sources and the promotion of the libraries and institutions that hold them. Highlights included presentations from the Music Library Lilian Voudouri in Athens, the Athens Conservatoire Library, The National Library of Greece, as well as music libraries in the North of Greece such as the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki and the Koventareios Municipal Library of Kozani — the oldest public music library in Greece founded in the 17th century.

Beyond the papers and meetings, the local organising committee put on a fantastic programme of cultural events, including several evening concerts and a range of tours offered on the Wednesday afternoon. The venue itself was beautiful, located on the waterfront with expansive views of the Aegean Sea sparkling in the sun.