Last night I attended “Who owns Culture?” at the New York Public Library which was a major highlight of my time in the US. The first great thing was that it was happening at the NYPL, the line up of events that are part of the Live from the NYPL program is amazing (next up is Robert Crumb!). It is wonderful that well over 400 people attended the event, I heard that it sold out in a day.

The main drawcard for most, was of course Jeff Tweedy but I was very pleased to see Lawrence Lessig speak at last, and his presentation was fantastic. It covered the history of evolving use of technology, the concept of “pirates” and the need to wage war on war where stifling of new voices and technologies is concerned. Jeff Tweedy gave his perspective as a musician, about how he uses new technology to get material to the fans.

There was a brief discussion of libraries and issues like finding new music, which gave me a few things to think about. For example, Tweedy said that he still relies on traditional methods of finding new bands by cross-referencing what he already knows and likes in magazine articles and record shops. How can this be done online? Amazon has tried it, but it doesn’t really work too well. Are folksonomies the answer? Are they too personal?

I use a similar method to find music as finding new academic articles to read. To find academic work I combine reading blogs, table of contents, analysing references and citations, and general searching through the Internet and databases. This method is time consuming, but tends to net most items of interest. What I don’t tend to use a lot of are subject headings. Which is probably the same reason I don’t use the keywords or genre searches on Amazon.com or discography sites like allmusic.com.

I did sneak in a few photos of the evening which are up on my Flickr page.