October 16, 2012 – Canadian Mennonite University recently acquired a large donation from the Winnipeg CBC’s music library, including 20,000 classical and jazz CDs. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation donated the CDs to CMU’s music program. CMU will make the collection available to other educational institutions as part of the agreement.
As the cataloguing process gets underway, CMU Library Director Vic Froese looks forward to reviewing the full collection.
“It more or less increases our existing CD collection by ten times, so it’s an enormous donation,” says Froese. “We’re very happy to have it.”
Among those benefitting greatly by the donation are the many music students at the university who use the library’s CDs for their music listening requirements as part of their course work. CMU School of Music faculty and members of CMU’s choirs, vocal jazz ensemble, and other ensembles and students takings music lessons at CMU will undoubtedly also be among the many Library users who will deeply appreciate this new treasure trove of classical and jazz music.
Froese also points out that the donation will benefit the wider community as well as other educational institutions, as intended by CBC in making this gift to CMU in summer 2012.
“We’re happy that we can not only serve our CMU School of Music with this collection, but also the broader community,” he says. “Members of the public are welcome to use our library, and they can check out these CDs for seven days at a time.”
As part of a process it began in 2009 to digitize its entire music library, the CBC has been selling or donating CDs and albums to a variety of organizations.
For the present, due to a lack of library space at CMU, the CBC collection of CDs are temporarily in storage.
In June 2012, CMU announced an $11-million capital project to construct a new Library and Learning Commons. Shelving space for CMU’s CD collections will be incorporated into plans for the new library.
In the meantime, now that cataloguing is completed for the books and DVDs that were part of the CBC donation, cataloguing the CDs is the next phase to get underway – a process that will take thousands of hours of dedicated work. Froese and his colleagues in the library are up for the task, though, and looking forward to familiarizing themselves with this wonderful new collection from CBC.
“I don’t know what gems might be there, but I expect there will be many,” says Froese.
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CMU’s Vic Froese, Wes Bergen, and John Dyck display a few items from CMU’s newly acquired CBC CD donation.