Berklee Creates Music and Health Repository
Joy Allen, acting director of the Music and Health Institute and chair of Berklee's Music Therapy Department, developed the Music and Health Taxonomy with Heather Hedden.
Image by Mike Spencer
Berklee College of Music’s Libraries and Music and Health Institute have collaborated to create the first-ever music and health repository in the field. Over the past year, the college has consulted with Brandy King of Knowledge Linking and Heather Hedden of Hedden Informational Management to establish the underlying framework and structure for the Music and Health Institute Research Collection at Berklee.
Berklee REMIX (Research Media and Information Exchange), the college’s general platform for scholarly collections, will house the Music and Health Institute (MHI) Collection, including the newly developed taxonomy. Until now, existing research on the intersection of music and health has been difficult to sort through because it is dispersed across academic fields and often cataloged with broad terms, such as "music" and "music therapy."
The goal of the Music and Health Institute Research Collection is to improve access to relevant research by collecting it and storing it in one location. The new Music and Health Institute Taxonomy—built by Hedden and Joy Allen, Ph.D., acting director of the Music and Health Institute and chair of Berklee's Music Therapy Department—was developed to facilitate discovery. It enables users to find quality evidence that can help them recognize trends across the evidence base; compare and contrast studies on music and health; note quality studies and build on them; and identify gaps in the literature to develop a research agenda. Each of these actions will contribute to the creation of a strong evidence base needed to convince the medical community that music has a place alongside more traditional clinical treatments.
“With our music and health repository available on Berklee REMIX, Berklee has the opportunity to become the industry leader on this important topic in health care today,” said Allen. “The current selection of evidence-based data is dispersed across academic fields and often catalogued with broad terms. Through the MHI Taxonomy, we have created a resource that will store relevant and necessary information in one place for researchers and health care providers alike, affirming our commitment to open access whenever possible. Accessibility is key in providing music-based solutions for the treatment of medical issues, and we hope to be a leader in gathering the evidence on the effectiveness of these significant therapies.”
The Music and Health Institute Research Collection is currently available on Berklee REMIX, and will continue to be updated.
