Table of Contents
Letter from NEMLA’s Incoming Chair
NEMLA 2026 Spring Meeting Summary
NEMLA Spring Business Meeting Summary
By-laws Amendments Approved
Looking for a NEMLA Social Media Coordinator
Membership Renewals Opening Soon
Noteworthy News
— Jennifer Olson Retires
— Dictionary Catalog of the Music Collection Now on Digital Commonwealth
— Introducing Lauren Posklensky
NEMLA Officers
Publication Information
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A Letter from NEMLA’s Incoming Chair
Dear NEMLA Community,
I sit here at my kitchen table on this beautiful, sunny, and light breezy day, on this Monday evening in Maine, writing my first (incoming) Chair note of the 2026 – 2027 year. I am excited to take over the role of NEMLA’s Chair from Anne Adams, incoming Past-Chair. I am grateful to her and to our outgoing Past-Chair, Judy Pinnolis, for their gracious guidance and support throughout my transition from Member-At-Large to Vice-Chair this past year, and now to Chair. For those of you who might not know me, I am an MLIS-degreed librarian working as a nights and weekends library assistant in Access Services at the George and Helen Ladd Library, at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where I have been working primarily in the library’s Audio/Video Department for almost 9 years. While my current position is not specifically tailored to music librarianship, I have been fortunate to engage my love for music cataloging, collection development, and digital preservation involving print and digital music resources by working on a variety of different projects over the years, alongside Chris Schiff, the Music and Arts Librarian, Sharon Saunders, the Associate College Librarian for Systems & Bibliographic Services, and Matthew Banning, the Metadata Librarian. When I’m not working, I am spending quality time with my family and friends, knitting some kind of project (at the moment, a baby blanket for one of my friends who is having a baby boy in September), going out to see live music, singing soprano in the Maine Music Society Chorale, singing karaoke, or reading a good book.
I was delighted to see so many of you attend the spring 2026 meeting at Harvard University on Friday, April 17, 2026, both in-person and virtually! I am pleased that we had sixty-three registered participants, including fourteen first-time-attendees! It was an excellent day full of fascinating presentations, library tours, collection exhibitions, and networking! I want to reiterate my deepest gratitude to the members of the 2025 – 2026 Program Committee while I was NEMLA’S Vice-Chair and Program Committee Chair. I want to thank Laura Stokes, Sandi-Jo Malmon, Carol Lubkowski, Brianna Pérez, and Erin Conor for their tireless efforts and support during the year as we navigated various outcomes to produce NEMLA’s fall 2025 meeting, held virtually on Friday, November 14, 2025, and, of course, the spring 2026 meeting, held at Harvard University a couple of months ago. Special thanks to Sandi-Jo and Erin, as well as all of the relevant folks involved, in making it possible for the hybrid meeting to be hosted at Harvard. Thank you also to Hannah Ferello, NEMLA’s Secretary-Treasurer, and Donna Maher, NEMLA’s Web Editor, for handling registration and getting the meeting details onto NEMLA’s website, and to Jennifer Hadley, NEMLA’s Newsletter Editor, for publishing announcements and updates from the Program Committee in the past few newsletter issues on the NEMLA website. I am beyond grateful we were able to recruit newer folks–both MLIS students and first-time presenters, most of whom were also first-time-attendees to present at the meeting. Thank you especially to Miruna Eynon, Lauren Posklensky, Roberta Dougherty, and Jared Cowing for delivering such unique and captivating presentations that greatly impact the progression of our profession as music librarians. I encourage more students, early-career personnel, and first-time presenters to consider presenting and sharing their work with our community at future meetings. Welcoming newer folks is key to discovering new ideas and contributions that will hopefully be enriching to the growth of individuals and the NEMLA organization.
The Nominating Committee is seeking new nominations for the 2027 – 2028 academic year! I want to emphasize the importance of and encourage anyone potentially interested in joining a committee to do so! Participating in one or more committees as a member or even serving as the Chair of a committee is a great way to get involved! NEMLA is such a supportive, low-pressure, and welcoming environment that the simple process of joining one or more committees provides so many opportunities to get to know others within the organization, develop essential skills such as leadership, and collaborate on some wonderful, innovative projects that benefit both NEMLA and the music librarianship profession. To reiterate the announcement made at the spring 2026 business meeting, the following committees are looking for new members, and in some cases, new Chairs:
- The Nominating Committee is seeking new members.
- The Program Committee is seeking new members.
- The Instruction Committee is seeking new members and a new Chair.
- The Education and Outreach Committee is seeking new members.
- The Technical Services Committee is seeking new members.
- The Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, & Justice Committee is seeking new members and a new Chair.
- Note that the EDIJ Committee Chair is an elected position.
If any of these committees sound interesting to you and you are thinking about joining any of them as a member, or want to take on a committee that needs its next Chair, please do not hesitate to reach out to either me (ecolucci at bates.edu), Anne Adams (anneadams at fas.harvard.edu), or any of the current Chairs of the respective committees via the Committees page on the NEMLA website. We are happy to have you!
I want to take the time to sincerely reiterate my thanks to Anne Adams, who has actively led the NEMLA board and membership during her term, getting us to where we are as an organization today. As previously stated, she will be moving into the role of NEMLA’s Past-Chair and Chair of the Nominating Committee. I also extend my gratitude to our outgoing Past Chair, Judy Pinnolis, for all of her work for NEMLA, including her tireless efforts while serving as Chair of the Nominating Committee to recruit folks for committees or to the board, which includes me to serve as last year’s Vice-Chair and now Chair-Elect. I am also grateful to Marci Cohen, who continues to persevere with full force in serving as NEMLA’s Member-At-Large and Chair of the Education and Outreach Committee. She is working to build and improve NEMLA’s relationship with other New England (music) library organizations and is diligently seeking travel grant opportunities for NEMLA folks who need financial support to travel to the annual Music Library Association conference in the near future. I am excited to see the direction of her initiatives. I also thank Patrick Quinn, NEMLA’s outgoing Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ), for all of his hard work and dedication to improving NEMLA’s EDIJ philosophy and creating a more positive and inclusive outlook on that front over the past two years during his term. Lastly, I want to also thank Carol Lubkowski for graciously stepping up to serve as NEMLA’s next Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect and Program Committee Chair for the 2026 – 2027 year. I am excited for our next virtual conference (virtual) meeting in the fall, as well as am looking forward to seeing where we will be for the next in-person meeting in spring 2027.
I am also so glad Carol will be continuing the efforts I initiated in revitalizing NEMLA’s mentorship program I coordinated during the spring 2026 meeting.
Speaking of the Mentorship Program, I am also grateful to Hannah Ferello for her instrumental and essential work in helping me identify potential mentees who wished to participate in the mentorship program during the spring 2026 meeting, as well as to Judy Pinnolis, Marci Cohen, Jennifer Hadley, and Lisa Zeidenberg, who kindly volunteered their time to serve as mentors, and all the mentees who participated in the mentorship program. In addition to improving the continuity of the mentorship program, I hope that we will be able to recruit more long-time NEMLA members to serve as mentors to guide prospective mentees with their experiences and background, as well as their expertise and knowledge of the music librarianship field. I believe having a sustainable mentorship program is an essential avenue to encouraging our first-time-attendees and early-career professionals to become well acquainted and comfortable, welcoming them to be a part of NEMLA.
I look forward to serving the NEMLA membership as well as working with all board and committee members in their new and existing roles, in my new capacity as NEMLA’s Chair beginning Wednesday, July 1, 2026. Here’s to a wonderful and successful 2026 – 2027 year ahead!
Respectfully submitted by Emily M. Colucci
NEMLA’s incoming Chair and Library Assistant in Access Services, Bates College, George and Helen Ladd Library
NEMLA 2026 Spring Meeting Summary
The NEMLA hybrid Spring Meeting was held April 17, 2026 at Harvard University’s Lamont Library in Cambridge, MA. 65 people registered.
Three representatives from Harvard Libraries provided the welcome and opening remarks. Anne Adams did so in two roles: chair of NEMLA and Metadata Manager for Harvard’s Loeb Music Library. Erin Conor, the Richard F. French Librarian, introduced Ardys Kozbial, Assistant University Librarian for Content Strategies and Associate Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Kozbial discussed the recent event in the music library, the launch of the exhibition for the new Randy Weston collection, marking his centennial. The event included a concert by Vijay Iyer. Kozbial connected this to the larger goals of the library and libraries in general.
Emily Colucci, NEMLA program chair, moderated the day. Kerry Masteller, Music Librarian for Scholarly Communications and Digital Programs at Harvard provided tech support for the event, benefitting both in-person and remote attendees. Susan Skoog of the College of the Holy Cross was the videographer, providing a live feed for virtual attendees and a recording for later access.
Miruna Eynon, MLIS Candidate, Simmons University presented “Revisiting Piano Rolls.” She described what she learned in a project cataloging piano rolls at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Music and Performing Arts Library. She used the Stanford Documents, the only existing guidelines for working with this type of material. A key point is: “Different piano rolls need different player pianos” which need to be documented in the 500 field. She described the resources used to identify dates, which often do not appear on the rolls themselves. She also wrestled with LC subject headings for works that are, rather than are about, piano rolls and advocated for an LC genre form term, acknowledging the limited interest.
Lauren Posklensky, MLIS Candidate, Simmons University presented “I’d Rather Stay Forever: On the Intersection of Punk Ethos and Radical Archival Practice in New England.” She opened with the song “Just Exist” by melodic hardcore band Touché Amoré to represent reconciling the punk ethos of not wanting to be remembered forever with archival practices of remembering forever. She looked into DIY (do-it-yourself) communities to theorize about them, questioning whether archives – community-run or established professionally-run institutions – honor punk ideology. Her research inspired her to create a punk zine archive, driven both as a participant and community member and an archival professional. She outlined her intentions, including wanting to be transparent about all her doubts about her approach. She identified the examples she used as inspiration. In response to questions about her process, she mentioned there are zines about how to digitize zines.
For the Loeb Music Library visit and gallery talk, Erin Conor provided an introduction in the beautiful Spalding Room. Peter Laurence and Christina Linklater talked about the Randy Weston centennial exhibition. Laurence described Weston’s career as a jazz composer and pianist with strong connections to his African heritage. Weston toured Africa extensively, worked with local musicians, and founded a club in Tangier. There are more than 2,500 recordings, both audio and video, in the collection. Linklater described the challenges of stewarding this type of collection, providing for both the big picture and granularity for use. It is the largest collection in the music library. She reflected on how the Weston archive is tangentially the archive of his many collaborators, including his tailor because, at 6’ 7”, Weston needed custom clothes.
Following lunch and the business meeting, the attendees moved to nearby Houghton Library, where they viewed items selected from music special collections specifically for this audience and an exhibition on the typewriter and an exhibition on the typewriter.
Upon returning to Lamont Library, Roberta L. Dougherty, Librarian for Middle East Studies, Yale University, presented “Music, Women, and Leisure: Piano Sheet Music and the Amateur Musician in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt.” Her work is based on a corpus of 119 pieces of sheet music from Cairo. She was more interested in the meaning of everything outside the music itself. She was intrigued upon discovering works by female composers, on Egyptian themes, and owned by women, and she sought more. Many were by Mathilde Abdel Messih and her daughter Sophie Abdel Messih. One challenge in printing the music is that Western notation is left-to-right while Arabic language is right-to-left. Print runs were often small, and “edition” was sometimes used in lieu of “printing.” She discussed the tension in the 1930s between old style, taught by ear, and new styles of music, which were notated. The sheet music was part of the process of demonstrating that a young bourgeoisie woman was well-bred. Notably, they weren’t trying to emulate their British colonizers.
The event wrapped up with Jared Cowing, Boston Library Consortium, presenting “Working with Systems Colleagues to Improve Music Discovery.” Cowing has been a systems librarian but previously was a music and A/V cataloger. He came to learn about the current challenges faced in dealing with music materials. Working with Koha, he observed Sam Cook, music librarian-turned-systems librarian, applying coding skills to solve cataloging problems, which got him intrigued about systems librarianship. Since 2015, catalogs have moved away from name/title browse. Uniform titles haven’t had enough advocates to be deemed important. One solution is to give pieces of code to your systems person; Cowing has it available for Alma/Primo. He showed screenshots of an experimental system he has developed that could draw from numerous information sources including VIAF and Wikipedia to display instances in a collection of a work, displayed in a way that is useful to music users. He sought input from the audience of what the ideal would look like. There was interest from libraries running Folio in adapting for that platform.
Submitted by Marci Cohen, NEMLA Board Member-At-Large
(Editor’s note: The recordings and slides from the meeting will be available on the NEMLA Past Meetings webpage soon. Photos and videos by Susan Skoog, College of the Holy Cross, except where marked. )
NEMLA Spring Business Meeting Summary
Call to Order (Anne Adams)
Publications Committee (Jennifer Hadley): The call for newsletter submissions will come out soon. Proposal to change committee name to “Communications Committee” and add a Social Media Coordinator.
Instruction Committee (Carol Lubkowski): Call for new members.
Education and Outreach Committee (Marci Cohen): Call for new members. Proposal to create a travel grant for next 3 MLA meetings.
Technical Services Committee (Andrea Cawelti): Big changes coming in library technical services (new RDA). Call for new members.
Nominating Committee (Judy Pinnolis): Looking for nominations for the 2027-28 year.
Program Committee (Emily Colucci): Gratitude for all who helped with the conference. Call for new members.
EDIJ Committee (Yamil Suarez): Call for new members and nominations for Chair. Working on a NEMLA land acknowledgement statement.
Secretary/Treasurer Report (Hannah Ferello):
- 55 active members (as of April 10, 2026. Income from memberships: $576.
- Total cash in hand; $12,309.
- Fall Meeting (virtual): no income/expenses.
- Spring meeting (hybrid, Harvard): net income $230.61.
- For full details, see report.
Chair report (Anne Adams):
- MLA starting a Chapter Development Program to support regional chapters.
- (Emily Colucci) Mentoring program returning after 10-year hiatus.
- (Marci Cohen) Board has approved travel grants to national MLA for the next 3 years.
- Work continues on organizing the NEMLA G-Drive.
- Discussion of proposed by-law amendments.
Election results: incoming Vice-Chair/Chair Elect: Carol Lubkowski
Hannah Ferello, NEMLA Secretary/Treasurer, Catalog and Serials Librarian, New England Conservatory
By-laws Amendments Approved
The amendments discussed at the 2026 Spring Meeting have been approved. Thank you to everyone who voted.
See the by-laws here.
Submitted by Hannah Ferello, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
Looking for a NEMLA Social Media Coordinator
Are you interested in helping the NEMLA community share music events and news through social media? Would you like to serve NEMLA as its Social Media Coordinator? If so, please email Jennifer Hadley, jthom at wesleyan.edu.
Membership Renewals Opening Soon
Membership renewals will be opening on Monday, July 6. Please watch your emails for details in early July! If you have any questions about renewing your membership, please contact Hannah Ferello at hannah.ferello at necmusic.edu.
Submitted by Hannah Ferello, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
Noteworthy News
Jennifer Olson Retires
Jennifer Olson’s official retirement date as Technical Services Librarian for Allen Library, the music and dance library at the University of Hartford, was March 31. She will continue on in a temporary part-time position as Technical Services Projects Librarian, however, until the library is able to hire her replacement, which will be (at the earliest) sometime in August.
Congratulations Jennifer!
Submitted by Jennifer Olson, Technical Services Project Librarian, Harrison Libraries, University of Hartford
Dictionary Catalog of the Music Collection Now on Digital Commonwealth
The Boston Public Library has expanded access to our music collection by digitizing the 24 volumes of its Dictionary Catalog of the Music Collection, a compilation of photocopied catalog cards representing the only known extant copy of BPL’s music catalog cards. The first twenty volumes were published in 1972 followed by a 4-volume supplement released in 1977. These 24 volumes average out to about 775 pages each, with every page featuring a grid of 21 cards, leading to a very rough estimate of 390,600 bibliographic entities represented; our own counts suggest that only some 27% of these might be cataloged in Polaris.
For decades, these volumes were previously only available physically and for departmental usage only, with no record for them in Polaris at all; and the only other digitized copy online was of poor resolution and lacked the four supplementary volumes. For the first time, all 24 volumes are fully cataloged and available in crisp, high-resolution detail on Digital Commonwealth as the first addition to the Boston Public Library Publications, Catalogs, and Administrative Records repository. These volumes are keyword searchable, and we one day hope to integrate AI enhancements that improve that searchability and allow us to parse the pages into discrete catalog cards, which in turn can create opportunities to extract the data from each card to rebuild bibliographic records in Polaris at a large scale. In the meantime, the digitized volumes represent a significant expansion of patron and staff access to our deep music collections at BPL.
Submitted by Rebecca Hunt, Performing Arts Librarian, Research Services Department, Boston Public Library
Introducing Lauren Posklensky
Lauren Posklensky is excited to join NEMLA as a new member! Lauren recently earned her Masters’ of Library and Information Sciences from Simmons University. She presented her independent project, “I’d Rather Stay Forever: On the Intersection of Punk Ethos and Radical Archival Practice in New England”, on building a digital zine archive that seeks to adapt archival standards to the ideologies of DIY communities, at the NEMLA Spring Conference. Additionally, she presented “Concepts of Sweet Revenge: My Chemical Romance and the power of worldbuilding” at the inaugural EmoCon, a conference dedicated to Emotional Hardcore music. Lauren will be a founding member of the soon to launch Emo Scholars Network, and will lead a project to create a research guide for the academic study of Emo. Lauren’s other music related professional interests include radio, obsolete music formats, and music based transformative works. She can’t wait to connect with members of NEMLA with similar interest and learn all she can from experienced Music Library professionals!
Submitted by Lauren Posklensky
NEMLA Officers
Publication Information
New England Quarter Notes is published quarterly in the fall, winter, spring, and summer.
Back issues may be accessed from:
http://nemla.musiclibraryassoc.org/resources/newsletters/
Address all correspondence concerning editorial matters to:
Jennifer Hadley
jthom at wesleyan.edu
Inquiries concerning subscription, membership and change of address should be directed to:
Hannah Ferello
hannah.ferello at necmusic.edu
Membership year runs July 1st to June 30th.
Regular Personal Membership:$12.00
Student and Retired Membership:$6.00
Institutional Membership$16.00
Return to the New England Music Library Association home page