Plenty of Music, No Hassle
By Meg McCaffrey -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2004
No longer will librarians have to buy or catalog individual CDs, nor will they have to contend with stolen music; recordings aren't downloaded, but retained online, where users listen to them with Web plug-in files such as Windows Media Player. So don't think of Naxos as a classical Napster.
An annual subscription rate of $750 allows up to five simultaneous users to access any recording in 64K streaming sound. That sound is "near CD quality," says Marlene M. Wong, a librarian at the Josten Performing Arts Library at Smith College in Northampton, MA.
The Naxos Library will potentially expose kids to a wealth of music they might never have heard—about a quarter of the library's contents are historical recordings, world music, and jazz by artists such as Fats Waller and Django Reinhardt. "The great thing is the access," Wong says. The recordings all come with liner notes filled with information about the composers and performers, and their other works.
For those libraries that prefer their music the old-fashioned way—on disk—Naxos offers CDs of the collection online at www.naxos.com. The CDs cost about $8 each.
