Jurying Guidelines

Community Jurors (or Curators) make significant contributions to your local music project, and they play a key role in the development, health, diversity, and visibility of your collection. This document summarizes guidelines based on our experience building local online music collections with libraries, but there are no hard and fast rules. It’s important to consider what’s special about and important to your local music community when working with jurors.

Who to select?

Community leaders. Folks who really know the music scene or certain parts of it. Active musicians with rich local networks. Media influencers (from bloggers to music journalists). Entrepreneurs who run local record labels, record stores, and venues that book local acts. Music teachers who are involved in the local community. You get the idea.

Most importantly, you want a diverse and representative cross-section of your music community on your jury. Jurors play a key role in building diverse collections; where we see diverse juries, we see representative and inclusive community collections.

See Hennepin County Library’s MnSpin Curators page for an example of an A++ jury.

What do Community Curators do?

This is up to you, but over dozens of submission rounds we’ve learned that jurors are most effective when tasked primarily with outreach and promotion and secondarily with curation. Curators represent and legitimize the collection as much as they help with selection. Of course, your mileage may vary from one person to another.

Best Practices for Working with Community Curators

Be upfront about expectations: estimate their total time, and be specific about what you’d like them to do (e.g. 6 social media posts during the week of 2 different collection events and one hour-long video call).

Be sure to make promotion a part of your Curators’ commitment. This could take many forms, and should take into account your Curators’ strengths and communities. Ask bloggers to write about the project, and radio personalities to feature it on air. Ask musicians to reach out to their network however they do that most effectively. Their public support enhances the Library’s stature and increases the reach of your submission round.

Keep the actual jurying/curatorial work to a minimum. Asking folks to listen to 10 hours worth of submissions is unrealistic at best. Some tips for lightening the jurying load for your community jurors:

Collect only one track per submission, and request more only as needed. MUSICat has an easy feature for that.
Split submissions up among Curators by assigning submissions to their Queues, ideally assigning submissions in a few genres the Curator is strong in.
Have librarian curators do the heavy lifting; task them with listening to all or most submissions.
A general guideline is to give folks no more than 2 - 3 hours worth of listening at most. Considering that a track, on average, is 3 minutes long, then you’re looking at around 20 one-track submissions per hour of listening.
Ask Curators to simply recommend a small number of submissions for inclusion in your collection rather than rate all of the submissions in their queue.

Consider paying Curators an honorarium that’s equivalent to or a bit higher than your artist honorariums. Not every library does this, but it is a good faith gesture and underscores the fact that this effort is super valuable to the collection.

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