I am delighted to have accepted the position of chair of NEMLA. I want to thank Lisa Wollenberg for leading us through a challenging year both personally and professionally. We are all entering a new normal as many of our institutions continue to serve patrons while others are ramping up for in person services for the first time in nearly 18 months. I hope that no matter where you fall on the spectrum you will look to your colleagues in NEMLA for support and encouragement.
Our spring meeting was hosted via zoom with 102 registered participants from across the United States! I anticipate we will have another productive and energetic year ahead.
Allison Estell has decided to step down from her position as Member at Large. I speak for all of us in thanking her for the role she served in the last year. I hope a member of NEMLA will be interested in joining the NEMLA board in this capacity. I plan to reach out to the membership more widely in the early Fall.
One of the Board’s primary focuses has been to find a home for the NEMLA archives. It was decided by the board to keep them at the Boston Public Library. A big thank you to Emily Levine for working toward this end to develop a home for the legacy of NEMLA.
We have much to do this year as we continue our work toward a more equitable and diverse community. I am delighted to announce that Patrick Quinn has agreed to serve as our Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice Officer. I look forward to working with him. In our work this year, we will all continue to work toward an equitable response to racial violence and oppression.
Sandi-Jo Malmon NEMLA Chair
Spring 2021 Meeting Summary – May 7, 2021
(Brief highlights condensed from notes by Allison Estell. For further information, contact presenters. Email Jennifer Hadley with any corrections.)
President Lisa Wollenberg opened the meeting by welcoming attendees to NEMLA’s third all-virtual meeting. She noted that although it has been a difficult year, we have learned a lot. She suggested we all stop and reflect on our growth and put our new knowledge to good use, personally, professionally, and with NEMLA. She thanked the Program Committee for another exciting program.
Developing a Music Librarianship Course Centered on Theory and Praxis in Critical Librarianship, Social Justice, and Diversity Work (Memory Apata, Dartmouth College; Liz Berndt-Morris, Harvard University; and Anna E. Kijas, Tufts University)
The goal of this working group was to design a course accessible in format, content, and cost, inclusive to everyone regardless of prior knowledge, and which addressed and challenged biases from a critical reflective practice. In February 2020, the working group shared a white paper with MLA for feedback and then hired a course design consultant, Jeannie Chen, who had experience with distance learning. They gave her a 15-week syllabus and asked for feedback on diversity, inclusion, and social justice, creating safe space, and acknowledging barriers to access. Jeannie’s recommendations included to integrate anti-racism principles throughout assignments, objectives, readings, structure (not just a statement at the beginning) and to create a brave space (need courage, rather than seek appearance of safety). Action items included using community language (we/you, not third person), removing jargon, centering individual experiences, defining safe/brave, and distinguishing between course goals and learning objectives.
Boston Rock City: A Linked Data Initiative (Christina Linklater, Harvard University; Peter Laurence, Harvard University; Christine Fernsebner Eslao, Harvard Library; Kate Mancey, Harvard University)
Arthur Freedman’s collection documenting live performances of local rock bands was donated to Harvard in December 2011. It consists of 500 analog audio cassettes (1976-2000, most late 70s to mid-80s), which went to Loeb, and 1158 video recordings in various formats (1985-2011), which went to Harvard Film Archive. It also includes some set lists, tickets, flyers, and other artifacts. The hope is to unify the two subcollections eventually. The finding aid is available here. Work on the collection included transcribing all the notes from the tape cases and updating permission agreements to account for streaming. As bands were contacted, they also offered metadata and new content. Using wikidata/linked data allows for metadata to be shared beyond Harvard in any language and shows relationships between items (e.g., between bands/genres/venues, etc.). The team has scheduled an Editathon on May 21-22, 2021 and are planning various exhibitions.
Teen Music Maker Showdown (Ritse Adefolalu, Boston Public Library, Lower Mills Branch)
The Teen Music Maker Showdown was a statewide virtual youth music contest with a live online results show that Ritse organized at BPL with The Hip Hop Transformation (THHT, a Cambridge afterschool program) and four other youth organizations. There were cash prizes and the option to compose a song for BPL. The aim was to show kids that their art has value and should be treated professionally. 39 teens submitted 75 songs (each entrant was permitted up to three songs). Networking and marketing were important to building this program. BPL teen services has a Twitch channel for gaming, live conversations, guest authors/artists, career exploration, and now teen-created content. They held a Kickoff Twitch livestream on Feb. 5 with an overview of the rules and music production demos by a THHT student. They revealed the top ten at an Awards Celebration on March 5 with133 distinct attendees and 500+views of the recording.
Reframing the Music Classroom: Incorporating Anti-Racist Practices and BIPOC Voices: Collaborative Practices (Debra Mandel, Northeastern University)
As part of the university anti-racism initiative, each library department created goals and the Music Department created a statement of solidarity. Professor Francesca Inglese received a grant to aid music faculty to center BIPOC and to gather resources to create anti-racist music classrooms. Debra was part of the project team and provided library support, instruction in Leganto, and recommendations as selector. Two student researchers (2nd-year and 4-year undergraduates) were hired to drive much of the work. They created a resource subject guide and six biweekly newsletters to highlight resources, and presented to a RISE conference at NEU. Daphne Brooks and Terri Lyne Carrington were invited as guest speakers. The project highlighted a collaboration among faculty, students and a librarian, raised engagement and awareness, and showed students their work was valued.
Musical Political Parody in Presidential Elections (Emily Spitz, former 2019 Library of Congress Librarian in Residence and participant in developing a music instruction audiobook for patrons of the National Library Service for the Print Disabled)
Emily shared many examples of the longstanding practice of musical political parody beginning with the Revolutionary War (Yankee Doodle is a parody itself and was parodied a lot), “The Battle of the Kegs” by Francis Hopkinson, a Tippecanoe and Tyler too parody, folk tunes parodying Whig candidates, anti-war parodies, the use of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinnafore, a “Good Night Ladies” parody, the use of “Pretty Woman,” and musical political parodies on late-night TV.
Beginning the Journey Towards Inclusive and Anti-Racist Metadata and Description (Anne Adams, Harvard University; Andrea Cawelti, Harvard University; Jennifer Dunlap, Harvard University; Jennifer Hadley, Wesleyan University; Rebecca McCallum, Wesleyan University; Hannah Spence, New England Conservatory)
Rebecca spoke about how to plan an evaluation of your metadata. It is important to incorporate multiple viewpoints, seek outside counsel/expertise if necessary, and see what other organizations are doing, e.g., Cataloginglab.org, #critcat. Especially consider subject headings referring to people and how the absence of important terms might affect discovery. Anne Adams spoke about initiatives to update controlled headings at Harvard and MLA CMC (Core ), for example, changing illegal aliens to undocumented immigrants locally and a LCMPT project to examine gendered medium of performance terms. Jennifer H. discussed how Wesleyan’s Music Library and World Music Archives are evaluating the use of “World music” and “Folk music” as subject terms. The definitions have changed over time. Staff will clarify local procedures, create instructions for student catalogers, and decide whether to review copy cataloging, and how much retrospective cataloging to do. They will also examine other headings, such as “Indians of North America” and “Popular Music”. Andrea and Jennifer D. discussed a project to apply inclusive and descriptive cataloging to American minstrelsy materials and correct problematic headings. Sometimes legitimate headings are applied incorrectly; lack of scope notes can be frustrating. Jennifer shared recommended terms and tips for doing this work. For example, do not use African American wit and humor for works of/about minstrelsy; only use African Americans—Music when music is actually African American music. Hannah shared the committee’s Links and Resources document for inclusive, anti-racist metadata. There was no time for group discussion, but the committee hopes to discuss the topic more at a future meeting and invites discussion on the NEMLA listserv. (See committee notes below.)
Listening Party (Peter Laurence, Harvard University)
Below are some of the tracks we enjoyed together:
The Exciters, “Life, Love & Peace”
Jesse Montgomery, “Strum,” perf. by members of LA Philharmonic
Idles, “Grounds”
Natalia Lafourcade and (many many) others, “Un Derecho de Nacimiento”
Queen, “I Want To Break Free”
Tori Amos, “Silent All These Years”
Pamela Z, “Ink” perf. by Volti
Seratones, “Power”
Zakkiyah, “Shades of Black: The Hip-Hopera”
Chris Kando Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, and “Charlie” Chin, “We Are the Children”
Business Meeting minutes
Call to Order
Committee news/openings
Publications – Announcement of Jennifer Hadley as the new Newsletter editor
Instruction – No news to report
Education and Outreach – No news to report
Technical Services – No news to report
Nominating – EDIJ position is looking for a chair
Program – Thanks from Sandi-Jo to the program committee
Oral History – All quiet….
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, & Justice – details were mentioned at the beginning of the spring meeting by Lisa Wollenberg. Committee is looking for a chair and will be assembling the committee after that.
Secretary/Treasurer report: Brendan Higgins
Report attached (see below)
Archivist report: Emily Levine
Found a new space for NEMLA archives – Brockton Public Library (thanks to Paul Engel) (Note: See change above.)
Archivist will be reviewing our current standards for collecting materials
More work to be done on processing, but with more access to materials, she hopes to integrate the archival materials into Newsletter and other outreach venues
Chair report: Lisa Wollenberg
Retiree recognition
Carolyn Johnson and Ray Schmidt
Provided flowers to both retirees
Fall joint meeting
Looking to work with other MLA chapters for a joint meeting
Discussion on proposed by-laws amendments http://nemla.musiclibraryassoc.org/new-england-quarter-notes-march-2021-no-207/#Proposed-Bylaws-Amendments
No discussion from members. Board will move forward on amendments
Election results, announcement of new board members: Brendan Higgins
Grants 1) MLA chapter grant – Music Librarianship course development Initial funds $1,150.00 Funds used $175.00 Current remaining $975.00
2) Oral History Grant Current remaining $450.51
Membership Total active membership: 74 New membership: 11 Gross income from membership: $774.00
Fall Meeting Summary – October 23, 2020 Held over Zoom 81 total attendees registered No income or expenses
Spring Meeting Summary – May 7th, 2021 Held over Zoom 102 total attendees registered No income or expenses
Submitted by Brendan Higgins, former NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
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Secretary/Treasurer’s Report
Membership
Thanks to all who have renewed their memberships already this year! For those who have not yet renewed, instructions are below. All dues are collected through the Music Library Association website.
**This year we are again extending to members that are on furlough, unemployed, or are experiencing other financial hardships the option of choosing the Student/Retiree price for your normal membership. We’re using the honor system for this option and won’t be asking for confirmation of your eligibility.
Instructions for Renewing Members Who Have an MLA Site Profile
You have two options. (Either way, you will be asked to log into your existing user profile first. Please do not create a new profile!)
For NEMLA members who have previously purchased a multi-year membership, you will still have to “renew” your NEMLA membership through the MLA website this year, in order for us to maintain accurate membership records. I have sent you individual emails with a discount code that will allow you to renew without paying the fee. If you have any questions about the current status of your membership or the renewal process, please email Carol Lubkowski at clubkows at wellesley.edu.
Bylaws Amendment
The proposed Bylaws Amendments to create an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) Officer and Committee passed unanimously with 34 votes.
Submitted by Carol Lubkowski, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
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Committee News
Seeking volunteers for open positions
There are currently many open positions in the NEMLA structure. We want YOU to fill one! No prior experience necessary. All terms are for two years except where specified. Please contact the appropriate person below for more information or to volunteer.
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice Committee · 2-3 members needed · Contact: Lisa Wollenberg, Lwollenbe at hartford.edu
Member at Large · Chair of the Education and Outreach Committee and voting board officer. Term begins immediately and ends Spring 2022. · Elections to be held next spring for the full-term position, which will hold office Spring 2022 to Spring 2024. · Contact: Sandi-Jo Malmon, smalmon at fas.harvard.edu
Nominating Committee · 1 member needed (starting after the October meeting) · Contact: Chris Schiff, cschiff at bates.edu
Program Committee · 1 member needed · Contact: Memory Apata, memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu
Submitted by Lisa Wollenberg
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Technical Services Committee
At the spring online NEMLA meeting, the Technical Services Committee presented a panel discussion on “Beginning the journey towards inclusive and anti-racist metadata and description.” As part of preparing for that panel, the group created a shared Google Doc of “Useful links and resources for moving towards inclusive and anti-racist metadata.”
We’re hoping this will be a living document, with new links and resources added over time. There are so many resources and articles out there. If you see something you think should be added to the list, please email one of us, and we’ll add it to the shared document.
If you have questions about any of the specific sections of the presentation, please email us. Anne Adams: anneadams at fas.harvard.edu Jennifer Hadley: jthom at wesleyan.edu Andrea Cawelti: cawelti at fas.harvard.edu Jennifer Dunlap: jennifer_dunlap at harvard.edu Rebecca McCallum: rmccallum at wesleyan.edu
If we had been able to instigate a discussion, we would have asked the following questions. If you feel inspired, feel free to do a little discussing on the NEMLA listserv!
Is your institution already taking steps to alter any of its metadata, and if so, what are you all doing?
What tools or resources (in addition to the shared Resource page) would be helpful for the NEMLA Tech Services committee to create and post? In what ways do NEMLA members want to collaborate to work on these metadata issues?
Submitted by Rebecca McCallum
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Fall 2021 Meeting Preview
We are delighted to announce a joint fall chapter meeting among the New England, Texas, and Atlantic chapters October 8-9, 2021, online. (Our first non-contiguous chapter meeting!?) The chapter chairs have met and decided to join forces for a virtual gathering. Our chapters’ individual needs are somewhat different, but we felt it was to our mutual advantage to congregate all together for what we hope will be a dynamic virtual meeting.
Call for Presentation Proposals
The joint program committees of our three chapters are accepting proposals for presentation at the virtual fall meeting on October 8-9, 2021. Presentations should be 30 minutes in length, not including time for questions. If you submit a proposal for a longer presentation and there is not enough room on the program, you may be asked to consider reformatting your topic for a lightning round session. While all proposals will be considered, we are especially interested in presentations addressing the following topics:
Special collections
Live or pre-recorded tours/showcases/demonstrations
Teaching with special collections
Scholarly work produced using your institution’s special collections
Music libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic
Diversity, equity, & inclusion in music libraries
Lightning Round Sessions
The purpose of lightning round sessions is to quickly share a concept or project. Sessions should last no more than 10 minutes.
How to Submit
To propose either a full-length or lightning round session, please submit the names and contact information for all presenters along with an abstract of 100-300 words describing your presentation via this form by September 3, 2021. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance into the program by September 10, 2021.
Congratulations to Debra Mandel, who retired as Director of Northeastern University Library’s Recording Studios on July 1, 2021!
Debra began working in the new Snell Library in July 1990 as the Media Center’s Operations Administrator and was promoted to Head a few years later. In 2007 the Media Center’s listening, viewing and borrowing services were transformed into the Digital Media Design Studio (DMDS) for multimedia creation and instruction. In 2014 the DMDS was reconfigured and relaunched as the Recording Studios.
Prior to Northeastern, Debra worked at Wentworth Institute, Lesley College, Billerica Public Library, Quincy College and Noble & Greenough School. She held pre-MLS jobs at Boston University, Harvard, the National League of Cities and Tufts New England Medical Center.
Debra served as the Music library liaison at Northeastern for approximately 15 years. These are some of her music career highlights:
Donated Northeastern’s remaining vinyl collection to the Boston Public Library shortly after they had a flood
Managed collection development of music in all formats
Collaborated with Prof. Dennis Miller to create a special visual music collection on DVD
Taught music information literacy classes, sometimes in collaboration with University Archives and Special Collections
Launched new audio digitization, podcasting, audio and video music production services
Collaborated with Green Line Records and other student groups for studio production and live streaming performances
Created a listening area for the Solomon Jazz Collection on vinyl
Collaborated on the creation of the digital Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Archive which includes musical performances of Gideon Klein Scholars
Partnered with students and Prof. Francesca Inglese for the “Reframing the Music Classroom” research guide project
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Sandi-Jo Malmon Librarian for Collection Development Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 smalmon at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5415
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Memory Apata Music and Performing Arts Librarian Paddock Music Library Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755 memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu (603) 646-3129
Past Chair: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu (860) 768-4840
Secretary-Treasurer: Carol Lubkowski Music Librarian Wellesley College Wellesley, MA 02481 clubkows at wellesley.edu (781) 283-2076
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice: Patrick Quinn Instruction and Reserves Coordinator Boston University Boston, MA 02215 pquinn6 at bu.edu (617) 358-8523
Member-At-Large: (Currently Vacant)
Newsletter Editor: Jennifer Hadley Library Assistant Music Library and World Music Archives Wesleyan University Middletown, CT 06457 jthom at wesleyan.edu (860) 685-3897
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
In the last few weeks, it seems that each new day has marked a one-year anniversary of a different COVID-caused upheaval. It’s been one year (or more) since many of us attended an in-person concert, closed our libraries, started working from home, were furloughed or laid off, held our first all-virtual meetings and instruction sessions, and much more. For many, 2020 was the most turbulent and challenging year of our lives. But amid the turbulence, we have all grown a great deal. NEMLA has also grown, and I would like to reflect on some of our chapter accomplishments over the past year.
First, we held two incredibly successful virtual meetings, and have a third on the way. Our spring 2020 meeting was one of the first all-virtual library conferences during the pandemic, and I think we set a fantastic precedent! I’m proud to have been a part of it, and grateful to the many committee members, board members, presenters, and attendees who have made all these virtual meetings possible. Thank you!
Second, we received a chapter grant from MLA to design and implement a Music Librarianship course, as many New England library students don’t have access to music librarianship coursework through their own institution. Our working group has already started drafting a syllabus, hired a course design consultant, and are moving closer to making that course a reality.
Finally, we are taking real steps to creating more equity, inclusion, and diversity in NEMLA and the music librarianship profession. After collecting survey data and holding several open discussions with NEMLA membership, the board has approved language to amend the by-laws in order to add an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) officer and corresponding EDIJ committee to the organization. (See amendments below.) If these amendments are approved by the NEMLA membership, that officer and committee can get to work tackling the inequities and systemic oppression that have excluded and continue to exclude too many people from our organization, profession, and institutions. I hope you all take the time to review the amendments, then bring your questions and concerns to the upcoming business meeting discussion.
Although the challenges of the last year were certainly not what I expected for my first term as chapter chair, I have learned a great deal (as have we all), and I’m incredibly grateful to my colleagues from NEMLA and the University of Hartford for their support along the way. I am also very much looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish in 2021!
Lisa Wollenberg NEMLA Chair
Proposed By-laws Amendments
The following are proposed amendments to the NEMLA by-laws, as approved by the executive board. There will be time to discuss these amendments during the upcoming NEMLA business meeting at our May 7 conference. Ballots for voting on the amendments, including any revisions made during the meeting discussion, will be distributed soon after, and the amendments will be made official if they pass a two-thirds vote.
[Note: Existing by-laws text is plain, additions are highlighted in yellow, and deleted text is in red/struck out.]
Addition under Article IV. Officers:
There shall be an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) Officer who shall be responsible for leading the chapter’s EDIJ efforts. The EDIJ Officer shall also serve as Chair of the EDIJ Committee. The term of office shall be two years.
Amendment and addition under Article VIII.A. Committees:
The Standing Committees shall be the Nominating Committee, the Program Committee, the Instruction Committee, the Publications Committee, the Technical Services Committee, andthe Education & Outreach Committee, and the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) Committee. Except when otherwise specified, committee chairs and members may serve no more than two consecutive terms. Service as a member does not preclude subsequent service as chair for two additional terms. Members may be reappointed after being off a committee for one year.
[A through F unchanged]
G) Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) Committee
The EDIJ Committee shall be chaired by the EDIJ Officer, and shall consist of at least two other members. Committee members should represent a diversity of identities and perspectives. Efforts should be made to include people from groups not well represented elsewhere in the NEMLA structure (Board, committees).
The committee shall lead efforts in EDIJ issues, including but not limited to:
Within NEMLA and the music librarianship profession, identifying and supporting efforts to dismantle barriers to the participation and advancement of members from historically underrepresented groups.
Supporting other NEMLA committees in their efforts to dismantle barriers to equity, diversity, inclusivity, and justice in each committee’s subject area.
Liaising with organizations beyond NEMLA to support broader EDIJ efforts affecting music and libraries.
Spring 2021 Ballot
The Nominating Committee is pleased to present the slate of candidates for this year’s election:
Vice Chair/Chair Elect Terry Simpkin is currently Director of Discovery & Access Services at Middlebury College in Vermont, overseeing the areas of Collections Management, Interlibrary Loan, Circulation/Reserves, and Systems. In addition, he is a co-owner of Flourish Music Metadata Solutions (http://www.flourishmusic.net/), a music contract-cataloging business, and has worked as a music cataloger in both the academic and contract-cataloging environments for almost 25 years. He currently serves on the NEMLA Program Committee, and in the past, has served as a member and/or chair of several Music Library Association committees, including the Authorities Subcommittee, Bibliographic Control Committee, Descriptive Cataloging Subcommittee, and the Task Force for the 2011-2020 MLA Strategic Plan. He has served as President of the Vermont Consortium for Academic Libraries (VCAL) and as a member of the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST) Executive Committee. Terry has an M.M. from Westminster Choir College in Organ Performance, and is an avid ragtime/novelty piano player and rock and roll drummer. Memory Apata is the Music and Performing Arts Librarian at Dartmouth College and would be honored to serve the NEMLA community as Vice Chair/Chair Elect. She has a B.A. in Vocal Performance and German from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a Masters in Library and Information Science from Simmons University. Memory served as Newsletter Editor for NEMLA from 2017 through 2020. She was a 2018 recipient of the Kevin Freeman Award and the Bibliothek & Information Deutschland Grant. She has presented her professional contributions at the conferences of NEMLA, MLA, and IAML. In 2020, she won the MLA Best of Chapters Award for her paper, “Social Justice Dialogue in the Music Library: Adapting the Brave Space Model for Outreach Events.” Her book chapter on the same topic appears in Scholarship in the Sandbox (ACRL, 2019). Along with co-writers Anna Kijas of Tufts and Liz Berndt-Morris of Harvard, she is currently working on the NEMLA Music Librarianship Education Task Force to develop an online course in music librarianship. Outside of academia, Memory maintains an active musical life, performing jazz, opera, and musical theater. Secretary/Treasurer Carol Lubkowski is the Music Librarian at Wellesley College; previously, she was the Public Services Librarian at the University of Hartford’s Allen Library. She would be honored to serve NEMLA as Secretary/Treasurer. Carol received her BA in music from Wesleyan University, her MM in music composition from The Boston Conservatory, and her MLS from Indiana University. Carol is currently the coordinator for MLA’s Contemporary Music Interest Group. At MLA 2016, she and Misti Shaw presented “How Much of BML4 is Available Online? Some Genre/Format Preliminary Findings”. At the 2020 New Music Gathering, Carol, Tom Bickley, Greg MacAyeal, and Lingwei Qiu presented “Getting Your Music into Libraries: How and Why”. Carol has also published four reviews in Notes. Her interests are the music of living women composers, feminist punk, and the future of audio recordings in libraries.
Anne Adams is the Senior Music Cataloger for music materials at Harvard University’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. Dr. Adams is chair of NEMLA’s Technical Services committee, and heads the Vocabulary Maintenance Task Group as part of MLA’s Cataloging and Metadata Committee Vocabularies Subcommittee. She has worked on NEMLA’s and MOUG’s program committees and has served as a member of the CMC Encoding Standards subcommittee and the BIBFRAME taskforce. A former assistant professor of voice at St. Olaf College, she holds a DMA in voice and a master’s in music theory from the University of Michigan and undergraduate degrees in voice and German studies from Oberlin College and Conservatory, in addition to an MLIS from Simmons College. Dr. Adams is also a freelance translator (German to English) and voice teacher, and has three kidlings at various stages of done-ness.
Submitted by Sarah Funke Donovan, Chair of the Nominating Committee
Spring 2021 Meeting Information
All times are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT-4).
The New England Music Library meeting this spring is scheduled to take place virtually on Friday, May 7, 2021 from 10 am – 4:15 pm.
10:15 am – 11:00 am: Developing a Music Librarianship Course Centered on Theory and Praxis in Critical Librarianship, Social Justice, and Diversity Work
Memory Apata, Dartmouth College
Liz Berndt-Morris, Harvard University
Anna E. Kijas, Tufts University
Building on the efforts begun by NEMLA members in 2018, the Music Librarianship Course working group has been developing a syllabus for a course that is centered around the principles of critical music librarianship with a particular focus on social justice and antiracist practices. This working group applied and received an MLA Chapter Grant for FY21 that will support a planning stage that will enable a Music Librarianship Course working group of the New England Music Library Association (NEMLA) chapter, with feedback from the Music Library Association (MLA) and the wider library community, to develop an accredited online music librarianship course and explore scenarios for delivery and implementation of the content. This initiative will address the barrier to access for credit-bearing courses in music librarianship for Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) students attending programs without a specific specialization in music librarianship, as well as center approaches and praxis for diversity and social justice work.
In this presentation, members of the Music Librarianship Course working group will provide an overview of the work completed thus far on the development of this course and how the chapter grant funding is being used to support our work. We will share insight into the principles and outcomes guiding the creation of the syllabus and most recently, the collaboration with a consultant whose efforts will focus on instructional design elements and who will interrogate the course content from a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. We will also provide an opportunity for feedback from colleagues who will be present at the chapter meeting.
11:00 am – 11:15 am: Break
11:15 am – 12:00 pm: Boston Rock City: A Linked Data Initiative
Christina Linklater, Harvard University
Peter Laurence, Harvard University
Christine Fernsebner Eslao, Harvard Library
Kate Mancey, Harvard University
The subject of our project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, an audiovisual archive capturing over four decades of Boston rock music performances. Beginning in the late 1970s, Arthur Freedman (born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1957) attended and recorded countless shows, maintaining an enormous archive in his home. In 2012, Arthur Freedman donated his collection to Harvard Library. It is now fully catalogued and will soon be available to stream online.
Harvard Library has enhanced access and description for this collection by welcoming band members to provide setlists, personnel listings and posters that can be used to develop the finding aids. We now seek to draw on the expertise of local music fans to develop a Wikidata presence for the collection that can be used to synthesize its data into a resource of equal interest to scholars and fans. With this initiative, we are testing ways in which Wikidata and other structured data repositories can be used to cultivate and capture community knowledge.
This work is being conducted by three Harvard Library staff members who approach the Arthur Freedman Collection from three distinct perspectives, reaching across our normal boundaries to collaborate on a project that will benefit librarianship and Boston rock history. Peter Laurence (Librarian for Recorded Sound and Media, Loeb Music Library) received the collection, created the finding aid, and has reached out to band members for permission to stream their recordings.
12:00 pm – 12:30 pm: Business Meeting
12:30 pm – 1:15 pm: Lunch
1:15 pm – 2:00 pm: Teen Music Maker Showdown
Ritse Adefolalu, Boston Public Library, Lower Mills Branch
This year, the Boston Public Library held a statewide youth music contest called the Teen Music Maker Showdown. The project was conceived and co-organized by Ritse Adefolalu, Children’s Librarian at BPL Lower Mills Branch, and originally sprung from a conversation he had started with a local hip hop artist on Twitter. This direct message chat soon grew into a partnership between the library and several community organizations and educators. Pursuing cooperation with the library’s Communications Department from the project’s outset allowed Adefolalu and his co-organizers to implement a strong marketing campaign across print news, radio, and social media outlets. The contest itself was one month long, and featured 3 main events: a kickoff livestream, a private Zoom workshop with professional musicians, and a livestreamed awards ceremony on Twitch, a platform popular with the target audience. The project team used a combination of licensed and free software to design a musically themed graphical layout for the livestreams. Despite the obstacles of remote programming, the contest drew a total of 75 submissions from 39 teenagers across Greater Boston, and the Awards Ceremony had over 100 live viewers.
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm: Lightning Talks
Reframing the Music Classroom: Incorporating Anti-Racist Practices and BIPOC Voices: Collaborative Practices
Debra Mandel, Northeastern University
This presentation focuses on a FY’2021 grant project awarded by Northeastern’s College of Art, Media and Design“to support research on social justice and anti-racism.” Written by Northeastern Assistant Professor of Music, Francesca Inglese, “this project aims to shift music studies at Northeastern by providing the tools to center voices of BIPOC in our research and our classrooms…” $5000 was awarded to hire two student researchers and a guest speaker to talk about anti-racism in music.
Working alongside Francesca Inglese and myself were two student researchers, Rose-Laura Meus and Avery Kelly, who created subject guides to gather scholarship by BIPOC in Music’s various music sub-disciplines and recommend readings and multimedia to “aid music faculty in the creation of an anti-racist music pedagogy.” In addition, Rose and Avery created a bi-weekly newsletter to spotlight relevant readings and media presentations.
This talk will highlight the project team’s approaches, processes and accomplishments and the different perspectives each member brought to the virtual table. Perhaps this project can serve as a model for music librarians looking to systematically study and showcase resources to support research on social justice and anti-racism and build more inclusive collections. The value of librarians teaming up with faculty and students outside the classroom to discover and share resources and voices on these topics cannot be overstated.
Musical Political Parody in Presidential Elections
Emily Spitz, former 2019 Library of Congress Librarian in Residence and participant in developing a music instruction audiobook for patrons of the National Library Service for the Print Disabled.
Scandal, intrigue, and malfeasance are integral to the American political landscape. Since the days of our founding fathers, musical political parodies express the diverse opinions of the electorate and inject humor and opposing perspectives during presidential elections. Tracing the evolution of political musical parody from 18th century broadsheets and convention asides to the conflicting opinions of today’s internet stars, this presentation examines the role of musical political parody in American culture.
2:30 pm – 2:45 pm: Break
2:45 pm – 3:30 pm: Beginning the Journey Towards Inclusive and Anti-Racist Metadata and Description
NEMLA Technical Services Committee
Anne Adams, Harvard University
Andrea Cawelti, Harvard University
Jennifer Dunlap, Harvard University
Jennifer Hadley, Wesleyan University
Rebecca McCallum, Wesleyan University
Hannah Spence, New England Conservatory
The panel will present a series of lightning talks on initiatives within the Music Library Association and the various institutions represented, addressing issues of diversity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism in metadata. Many of our institutions are at the beginning stages of this work; we are hoping this session will foster discussion and input from other NEMLA attendees. In addition to a broad overview of issues surrounding bias in metadata, and pointers to some of the many resources available on the subject, panelists will present on a specific process involving Minstrel music and shows, and on a discrete initiative within the MLA-CMC related to gender, as well as a few other institution-specific projects. There will be an opportunity for discussion and questions at the end of the panel.
3:30 pm – 4:15 pm: Listening Party
Peter Laurence, Harvard University
NEMLA Secretary/Treasurer’s Report
Membership
Thanks to all who have renewed their memberships this year. As we often do, NEMLA received a slight bump in membership following the MLA conference. We currently have 75 active members, including nine new members.
Renewal season will begin in June/July, so be on the lookout for the calls to renew for the 2021-22 year. If you have any questions about the current status of your membership or the renewal process, please email Brendan Higgins at bhiggins@berklee.edu
Submitted by Brendan Higgins, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
Noteworthy News
Orwig Music Library
The Orwig Music Library at Brown University will be undergoing a major systems renovation in Summer 2021, and thus will remain closed to the public. (The music library closed at the start of the pandemic and has been closed ever since.) Current projected reopening is September 2021. –– submitted by Laura Stokes, Performing Arts Librarian, Orwig Music Library, Brown University
Carolyn Johnson Retiring
Carolyn Johnson will be retiring as Connecticut College’s Music Librarian as of July 1, 2021. She began as a part time librarian in August 1985, eventually moving to full time. Her last day in the Greer Music Library is June 30, just short of 36 years!
Here are a few highlights from her career:
cataloging Connecticut College’s Historical Sheet Music Collection and the L. Mae Stephenson MacIntosh Sheet Music Collection (approx. 3,000 titles)
initiating a project that led to a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to digitize titles in the public domain from the Historic Sheet Music and MacIntosh collections and post them in the Digital Commons repository. (Note: Each year additional titles are digitized as they fall into public domain.)
building a collection of sheet music by Jesse Greer
managing the “refresh” of the Greer Music Library in 2005
and, perhaps most importantly, fostering a wonderful relationship with the Music Department and students (Tip: putting goodies out during exam times and Halloween helped!)
Avery Boddie New Music and Media Program Head at the Lewis Music Library
Avery Boddie is the new Music and Media Program Head and head of Lewis Music Library at MIT libraries, supporting the intersection of Music and technology and Media. He comes most recently from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was the Music and Dance Librarian.
He’s excited about returning to the East Coast, and Boston in particular, not only because MIT is his dream job and he loves Boston’s culture and history, but he’s also a longtime fan of the New England Patriots. His favorite types of music include disco, 70’s and 80’s funk (Chic, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Gloria Gaynor, Sylvester, Chaka Khan), and 90’s hip hop, and he likes to run every day, bake, and is currently learning German on Duolingo. Welcome, Avery!
Ray Schmidt Retiring
Ray Schmidt, Assistant Director for Discovery Services at Wellesley College, is retiring in June 2021. Prior to his time at Wellesley, he was the music cataloger for the MIT Libraries (1995-2007). At Wellesley, his responsibilities have included music cataloging as well as supporting public services at the Music Library. As a member of the Music Library Association, he served on the Bibliographic Control Committee’s Authorities Subcommittee, the Content Standards Subcommittee of the Cataloging and Metadata Committee, and the RDA Music Implementation Task Force.
Job Posting: Cataloging/Metadata Librarian at Wellesley College
Wellesley College seeks a knowledgeable, forward-looking, team-oriented Cataloging & Metadata Librarian to support user discovery of library resources at Wellesley College and beyond. The Cataloging & Metadata Librarian makes the Library’s collections accessible through the description and intellectual organization of these collections, following current standards and best practices for cataloging and metadata. Music cataloging experience preferred.
Northeastern University Library’s Recording Studios’ Staff and Students Record “Protect the Pack“
This past winter, full-time staff members, co-ops, and student employees of the Northeastern University Library Recording Studios joined their collective musical powers to record “Protect the Pack,” a song inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire project from songwriting to final mixes were produced virtually. The Recording Studios have been closed since March 13, 2020.
In addition to spreading the word about the importance of face masks and physical distancing to keep the campus community safe, the recording also serves as an example of the type of audio recording capability and support available to Northeastern students, faculty, and staff who need to make recordings while in quarantine.
Cover art of “Protect the Pack” by The Snell Family Band
The group, which calls itself The Snell Family Band includes full-time Studios’ supervisor Jonathan Iannone, co-op Chris de Pierro, and part-timers Ben DeUrso, Patrick Sayers, Jared Zimiroski, Isaac Schutz, and Craig Short. The Band began the project in late November 2020 and completed the initial recordings before the December break. Final mix and updates were completed by the end of February 2021, with cover art and credits by Antonio Banrey, the Recordings Studios’ Digital Media and Video Coordinator The group also recorded a video on Zoom about the creation and recording process.
During this past year, The Recording Studios has hosted a number of online workshops and one-on-one editing sessions, helping students, faculty, and staff create and edit high-quality audio and video recordings in their homes. Recordings of these workshops are available in the Digital Media Toolkit.
Submitted by Debra H. Mandel, Director, Northeastern University Library Recording Studios
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu Office: (860) 768-4840
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Sandi-Jo Malmon Librarian for Collection Development Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 smalmon at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5415
Past Chair: Sarah Funke Donovan Associate Archivist for Digital Assets Boston Symphony Orchestra 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115 sdonovan at bso.org (617) 638-9452
Secretary-Treasurer: Brendan Higgins Faculty Liaison and Outreach Librarian Berklee College of Music 1140 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02215 bhiggins at berklee.edu 617-747-8525
Member-At-Large: Allison Estell Associate Director for Access & Organization Douglas D. Schumann Library & Learning Commons Wentworth Institute of Technology 550 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115 estella at wit.edu (617) 989-4746
Newsletter Editor: Jennifer Hadley Library Assistant Music Library and World Music Archives Wesleyan University Middletown, CT 06457 jthom at wesleyan.edu (860) 685-3897
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
I would first like to give a very big THANK YOU to all of our board and committee members who have kept NEMLA moving forward throughout the chaos we’ve experienced in 2020! We held two very productive virtual conferences, had a successful round of membership renewals, brought our Instruction Committee back to full membership, and have made important steps in advancing our efforts with diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. And with that in mind, I have a few important updates:
First, the board is planning on creating a new position: the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Justice (EDIJ) Officer. From the feedback we received from the Diversity Committee survey this summer and subsequent discussion at the fall meeting, it seemed like the majority of NEMLA members supported making this position an official voting position on the board. However, establishing a new voting officer requires a change to the by-laws and an election (more on that below), which will take over a year. The board can create new positions at any time, but only for non-voting special officers. Since we want to start our EDIJ work without delay, the board plans to approve the special officer position to begin in spring 2021. Please consider serving in this position! If you’re interested, contact Sarah Funke Donovan, Chair of the Nominating Committee.
In the meantime, we will also work on amending the by-laws to create a permanent EDIJ Officer as a voting member of the board. We are already working on the by-law amendments, and once the board has approved them, the text will be sent to all NEMLA members to be discussed at the business meeting this spring. Ballots will then be sent to all members for a final vote. Assuming the amendments are approved, candidates will be on the 2022 election ballot, and the new EDIJ Officer (voting member of the Board) should take office at the spring 2022 meeting.
We also plan to establish a corresponding EDIJ Committee. It is the duty of the chair to create new committees, and I plan to do so as soon as we have the special officer in place to chair that committee. The official committee charge will be another part of the by-law amendments to be discussed at the spring 2021 meeting, so stay tuned!
Again, thanks to all of you who give your time in service to NEMLA, and a special thanks in advance to those who will devote their time to these very important issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice. We all must play a part in breaking down our current systems and rebuilding them to include the many diverse people who have been excluded for far too long. We all benefit from the ideas and perspectives diverse people bring to the table, and I am incredibly pleased to see NEMLA moving forward with this difficult and essential work.
Thank you!
Lisa Wollenberg
NEMLA Chair
NEMLA Secretary/Treasurer’s Report
Submitted by Brendan Higgins, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
Membership
Thanks to all who have renewed their memberships since our July renewal period. We currently have 58 active members, who have officially registered through the MLA website. Membership dues totaling $768.00 were received from MLA, as well as grant monies won by the Music Librarianship Education Task Force. If you have any questions about the status of your membership or the current process, please email Brendan Higgins at bhiggins@berklee.edu.
Fall Meeting
There were 82 registered attendees for our fall meeting, which was held via Zoom online. This includes 17 attendees outside the New England region. Since the meeting was held online and required no registration fee, there is no income nor are there expenditures to report for this meeting.
Fall 2020 Meeting Summary
Submitted by Allison Nowicki Estell, Member-At-Large
The New England Music Library Association’s Fall Meeting took place over Zoom on Friday, October 23, 2020. This was NEMLA’s first meeting specially dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion and antiracism in music libraries and our collections. Participation ranged from about 30 people at the beginning and end, to a peak of more than 50 during a substantial portion of the day.
In lieu of an opening speech, Chair Lisa Wollenberg led us in a relaxation and mindfulness breathing exercise to move away from the day-to-day stresses of our individual lives and to come together as a group for the meeting. She acknowledged the challenges we have faced and the changes we have gone through individually and collectively throughout 2020 and applauded our learning and perseverance. This set the stage for the board’s report on the NEMLA Diversity Survey that was conducted over the summer.
Lisa presented the results of the Diversity Survey, while NEMLA Archivist Emily Levine moderated chat and questions. There were 17 respondents to the survey; one person identified as a BIPOC, and one preferred not to answer that question. Key takeaways:
· Most respondents supported a diversity committee, but only two were interested in serving on it.
· Most respondents thought the Chair of the committee should be elected and should be a voting member of the NEMLA Board.
· Respondents were pretty split on whether non-NEMLA members or people from outside New England should be allowed to serve, unless it was clear that an individual could bring some special viewpoint or expertise to the committee.
· As for the committee’s charge, respondents favored focusing on underrepresentation in NEMLA’s membership, the profession, and our collections, but there was also support for focusing on our users, composers we collect, and collaboration with the MLA on diversity issues.
· In trying to determine how the board could get people to participate on this committee, some survey respondents spoke up and said that the reason they didn’t express interest in serving was because the goals and responsibilities of the committee weren’t sufficiently clear, and they weren’t sure they would be able to commit the time.
· Procedurally, if the Chair of the committee were to be a voting member of the board, we would need to change the bylaws (at the spring 2021 meeting), which could potentially push the formation of the EDIJ committee into 2022. Ideas to get around this included having roundtables in the interim to try to come up with the charge for the committee, and appointing an ex officio EDIJ officer to the board.
· As for the name of the committee, popular choices included Anti-racism, DEI (Diversity Equity, and Inclusion), Diversity & Inclusion, and JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). The first (Antiracism) was seen as potentially too narrow for the work of the committee in the long run; after initially focusing on antiracist work, people felt that the committee should be able to branch out into gender, accessibility, and other issues. But the last (JEDI) did start to see some support; in addition to people approving of the inclusion of the term “Justice,” there was also some enthusiasm about the prospect of committee members’ receiving light sabers.
After this, Jared Rex introduced Nurhak Tuncer of Elizabeth City State University, for her presentation, Immigrant Music Librarians in the U.S. Originally from Izmir, Turkey, Nurhak has been in the United States for 13 years, but she began this study back in 2018 in order to explore whether she was the only one grappling with a quest for belonging, and to bring a different perspective to the definition of diversity. This nationwide survey was conducted over five months in 2018, using Survey Monkey to collect anonymous responses to 30 multiple-choice questions with open-response options. Distributing the survey over ALA email lists, MLA-L, Music OCLC, and Facebook groups, she received 638 responses and 420 people completed the survey in its entirety. Respondents were more likely to be female, highly educated, in the US for decades, and holding leadership positions; many came to the US for family or educational reasons. Nurhak observed that immigrants are clearly making contributions to the library profession with their diverse backgrounds, and so now is the time for conversations about how to include these colleagues in our discussions on diversity and inclusion. Then she led us in an activity using Google Suite’s Jamboard. Participants enthusiastically responded to Nurhak’s prompts on whether we regarded ourselves as immigrants and whether we retain the cultural nuances of our ancestors in our identity somehow.
After a short break, we were treated to an Overview of Wesleyan’s Indian Music Collection, by Jody Cormack Viswanathan and Aaron Bittel of Wesleyan University. Originally scheduled as one of two lightning talks, we were not under time pressure to move quickly through these engaging musical examples because the second speaker (Dr. Tom Moore of Florida International University) was unable to join us for the meeting and present his talk. Jody and Aaron shared the cultural diversity of one of Wesleyan’s collections; materials from the promotion and celebration of the Navaratri (Nine Nights) Festival. After providing historical background for Wesleyan’s celebration of this festival, they presented videos showcasing a range of musical styles (some integrating dance), commenting that even Indians marvel at the musical and cultural diversity in their country. Jody and Aaron stressed the importance of collecting for diverse culture, as well as country or language. In addition to the performances, they showed marketing and outreach materials from the collection, including posters and photos. They are currently working on a grant proposal to digitize the whole collection. The performances and materials we were exposed to are a representative microcosm of the diversity of Wesleyan’s collection and the music in these cultures.
After a lunch break and breakout meetings for NEMLA committees, Memory Apata reminded us that her term as Newsletter Editor is coming to an end in December. Memory shared that getting involved with NEMLA as the Newsletter Editor was transformational, helping her decide to pursue her library degree and really engage with music librarianship as a career.
Following this ringing endorsement of the Newsletter Editor role, Ruthann McTyre of Yale University, as representative of the Music Library Association’s Strategic Planning Committee, led us in a discussion about the future of the Music Library Association, with particular attention to the MLA’s plans to address diversity, equity, and inclusion in the organization. Ruth ran the session as a focus group to enable the New England Chapter to provide input into this planning. The questions she asked included: What brought you to MLA and music librarianship? What is MLA doing well/could be doing better? How could MLA get broader participation in committees, including paraprofessionals? MLA membership continues to decrease; what can MLA do to stop/reverse this? What does MLA need to do to create a sense of belonging for everyone, especially underrepresented groups?
These questions yielded ideas and questions from attendees on a variety of topics:
· Accessibility at in-person meetings, both in terms of support for people with hearing differences, and remote access for those who cannot afford to attend in person
· MLA has had some great sessions around DEI, and the topic of how to attract a more diverse membership has turned into a deeper discussion about support and promotion.
· Ideas about how to maintain and extend the mentoring program
· Could we stave off decreasing MLA membership by reaching out to other performing arts librarians?
· Should we decenter English as the primary language at MLA conferences?
· We need to understand that inviting more people into MLA will and should change its culture, rather than forcing new members to assimilate into the organization as it is currently. Are there any affinity groups in MLA currently? If not, should we create these?
MLA’s strategic plan will cover the next 10 years, with specific action items for 2- to 3-year projects. The Committee will distribute a survey in advance of MLA’s spring meeting, and the results will be discussed in a town hall meeting on the topic. Ruthann invited anyone who wanted to give input to the strategic planning process, or who has questions or concerns about the process, to email her directly or to contact the chair of the Strategic Planning Committee, Holling Smith-Borne.
After this discussion and a short break, Program Committee Chair/Vice-Chair Sandi-Jo Malmon expressed her appreciation for the hard work of the Program Committee in organizing the Fall Meeting. I’ll follow her lead and mention here how much attendees appreciated their efforts.
Next, Rebecca McCallum introduced Kerry Masteller and Liz Berndt-Morris, both of Harvard University, who presented We’re Still Here!: Teaching Research Remotely. This session provided three case studies of library instruction developed during the pandemic:
· The first was a general music class with over 100 students learning both synchronously and asynchronously. Instruction in this course focused on research strategies. Liz and Kerry used Zoom polls interspersed with the live session, and a shared Google docs for students to document their search process and reflect on what worked or didn’t work.
· The second case study was an undergraduate seminar, smaller and synchronous. Assignments included a comparison of network maps created from Grove 2001 and 2018 articles on Felix Mendelssohn, as well as a guided assignment on Amy Beach to explore contemporaneous sources such as newspapers and concert programs; Liz and Kerry also held drop-in sessions outside of classtime.
· The third case study was an introductory graduate seminar, with library instruction provided asynchronously to the students. Liz and Kerry focused on the research process, including its affective elements; students were encouraged to share struggles and road blocks in a shared Google doc, and Liz and Kerry also reached out via Slack and Canvas.
Liz and Kerry have generously shared the handouts from these three instruction sessions at: bit.ly/NEMLAStillHere.
As a bookend to Lisa’s meditative exercise in the morning, Peter Laurence of Harvard University hosted another activity of communal self-care: a virtual listening party. This shared musical event was a way to continue our tradition of ending meetings with a concert and reception. In addition to providing a common experience, the listening party format allowed for “audience” participation: Peter kicked things off with “Ghetto Soundwave” by Fishbone, and then he drew from attendees’ suggestions. Peter presented the YouTube videos via Zoom screenshare; he usually uses the platform twoseven [https://twoseven.xyz/] for his listening parties, but it doesn’t play nicely with Zoom. The theme was songs of protest, but the energy in much of this music was a testament to resilience and hope. For those of you unable to attend this session (or who want to recreate the memory), here’s what we listened to together:
· Fishbone, “Ghetto Soundwave”
· Florence Price, “Sketches in Sepia,” performed by Samantha Ege
· Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions, “People Get Ready”
· Rebelmatic, “Please Don’t Shoot”
· Rhiannon Giddens, “At the Purchaser’s Option”
· Bob Marley, “Get Up Stand Up”
· John Lennon, “Imagine”
· Janelle Monae, “Mr. President”
· Stevie Wonder, “Visions,” performed by Cécile McLorin Salvant
· Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On”
· Sixx:A.M., “Life Is Beautiful”
· John Prine, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”
· Hadag Nahash, “Shirat Hasticker (The Sticker Song)”
· Manu Chao, “Clandestino”
These tracks captivated 27 attendees until the very last note.
Many thanks to Chair Lisa Wollenberg, the Program Committee, and all of our presenters for a varied and engaging day of learning, contemplation, and fellowship.
Spring Meeting Survey/Call for Proposals
The New England Music Library Program Committee is seeking proposals for our spring virtual meeting, scheduled to take place online on Friday, May 7, 2021. This one-day conference is an opportunity for New England-based music librarians and library staff to discuss topics related to all aspects of music librarianship and music scholarship.
As with the fall conference, the Program Committee is especially interested in proposals – either full length (40 min.) or lightning rounds (10-15 min.) – related to the following topics:
Diversity (or the lack thereof) in music librarianship, including topics relating to inclusive descriptive practices, description of world music, collection building, outreach, etc.
Protest music, including protest/parody music (e.g. Randy Rainbow, Tom Lehrer, Bob Marley, Childish Gambino)
Music by composers from diverse and/or under-represented groups
Popular musics such as blues, jazz, reggae, hip hop, etc.
Suggestions and best practices for providing remote services to patrons
Proposals for topics not on this list will also be happily considered.
If you would enjoy speaking on one of these topics, or have another topic in mind, please submit your proposal to smalmon@fas.harvard.edu by Friday, March 19, 2021.
For more information, please contact Sandi-Jo Malmon at smalmon@fas.harvard.edu or 617-823-3270.
Finally, the program committee is interested in providing meaningful social opportunities at the spring meeting. To that end, the committee has created a survey to gain feedback from the membership. Please share your thoughts via the linked Google Form.
Program committee members:
Sandi-Jo Malmon (chair)
Rebecca McCallum
Jared Rex
Terry Simpkins
Call for Nominations
We are now accepting nominations for the following officer positions on the NEMLA Board:
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect (3 year term):
Performs the duties of the Chair in the latter’s absence.
Serves as Chair of the Program Committee.
Also serves as an ex-officio member of the Education & Outreach Committee.
The term of office shall be one year after which the Vice-Chair shall succeed to the office of Chair and then Past-Chair, meaning a commitment of three years.
Secretary-Treasurer (2 year term)
Record the minutes of all meetings and preserve all official records and reports of the chapter;
Keep an up-to-date membership list and notify the members of all meetings;
Conduct correspondence of the chapter as may be required;
Prepare an annual budget, maintain chapter accounts, and report on status of these accounts at each board meeting;
Represent the organization in all financial matters, including collecting dues, receiving payments, and making authorized expenditures
Thank you for your consideration. Please email Sarah Funke Donovan, Chair of the Nominating Committee at sdonovan@bso.org if you have any questions about these positions or would like to nominate yourself or someone else for one of these positions.
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu Office: (860) 768-4840
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Sandi-Jo Malmon Librarian for Collection Development Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 smalmon at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5415
Past Chair: Sarah Funke Donovan Associate Archivist for Digital Assets Boston Symphony Orchestra 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115 sdonovan at bso.org (617) 638-9452
Secretary-Treasurer: Brendan Higgins Faculty Liaison and Outreach Librarian Berklee College of Music 1140 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02215 bhiggins at berklee.edu 617-747-8525
Member-At-Large: Allison Estell Associate Director for Access & Organization Douglas D. Schumann Library & Learning Commons Wentworth Institute of Technology 550 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115 estella at wit.edu (617) 989-4746
Newsletter Editor: Memory Apata Music & Performing Arts Librarian Paddock Music Library Dartmouth College Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755 memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu (603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
I am struggling to begin this message without some version of the now cliché “in these unusual and challenging times…” But indeed, the past few months have brought changes and challenges to almost every aspect of our personal and professional lives. I sincerely hope this message finds all of you safe and well. NEMLA has faced and continues to face our own set of unique challenges, and the Board and NEMLA committees have adapted and acted to keep us moving forward. We converted our spring meeting to a virtual format, and successfully hosted that meeting with attendees from across the United States and Canada, plus Serbia and Qatar! We have also adjusted our membership dues for the 2021 fiscal year, so that members facing financial hardship have the option to join or renew at the student/retiree rate.
The Board’s primary focus now is NEMLA’s response to racial violence and oppression. Thank you to those of you who attended and participated in our June 26 Town Hall meeting or submitted ideas via our Google form. The Board has taken these ideas under consideration in how we will move forward. Our statement and initial action steps follow here and will be posted on the NEMLA website.
The New England chapter of the Music Library Association stands in solidarity with our members and members of the communities we serve who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We wholeheartedly condemn acts of racial violence, murder, oppression, and injustice that too frequently target BIPOC in our society.
We recognize that NEMLA is a part of the systems that have historically excluded, marginalized, and held back BIPOC in libraries, music, education, and society as a whole. There is much work to be done by individuals, institutions, and organizations to break down systemically racist and inequitable practices. We are committed to actively taking part in this work, to move towards a society that is truly diverse, inclusive, equitable, and just for all people.
Therefore, the NEMLA Board has agreed to the following immediate action items:
Adopt a theme of diversity and anti-racism for the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 NEMLA meetings.
Establish a new NEMLA Diversity Committee to address issues of systemic racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion. The membership and charge for this committee will be determined after collecting input from New England music library workers.
As the second action item notes, we have not yet decided on the membership or official charge for the new Diversity Committee. The Board was not comfortable making these decisions in our small, exclusive, and notably un-diverse group. We wish to collect input from diverse voices to inform our decisions and make this process more transparent and inclusive for the people we serve and represent. Therefore, we have created a short survey to gather input on the new committee. I encourage everyone to complete the survey, and to do so with honesty and careful thought. The deadline for survey completion is September 25, 2020. We plan to assemble the results in the following weeks and share them during our Fall 2020 meeting.
The work of removing systemic racism from our organization and our society is time-consuming, challenging, and uncomfortable. But the rewards of building new, anti-racist systems are great, and the costs of standing still are even greater. I have seen NEMLA and its members accomplish many things, and I trust that together we can make progress. I look forward to undertaking this work with all of you.
Lisa Wollenberg, NEMLA Chair
Spring 2020 Meeting Summary
Marci Cohen, Boston University, adapted from the CAML Review
NEMLA had just opened registration for its spring meeting, scheduled for April 17, when COVID-19 caused widespread shutdowns. Rather than cancelling the event, the board decided quickly to make the meeting an online event, recognizing the opportunity to showcase program chair Lisa Wollenberg’s fruitful work to a wider audience than those who might have traveled to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Hall under normal circumstances. While not the first event to pivot this way, it was among the earlier ones.
At the peak, the event had approximately 130 participants, twice the usual attendance of our Boston meetings. Normally, the chapter would announce its meetings to the broader Music Library Association community primarily as a courtesy; this time we did so knowing we could attract the far-flung. The attendees included not only current NEMLA members but also former members who had left New England, our music library colleagues across the US and Canada, and even one logging in from Serbia and another from Qatar.
The event required preparation because most were new to Zoom in March and April. I hosted and provided tech support for the Zoom meeting in my final act as past chair. I offered to do practice runs with all presenters, confirming that they could connect to Zoom, and reminded them to have a phone and phone number handy as audio back-up. With one presenter, we learned together how to share computer audio. I did a sound check with different microphones for the concert performers. I chose licensed music to stream during the meeting down times so that attendees would know their audio was working. After studying Zoom’s best practices documentation, I recruited two coworkers as cohosts to handle tech questions from attendees and tamp down on potential Zoom bombing, but both tasks proved unnecessary.
Although we could not meet at the BSO, Tony Fogg, William I. Bernell Artistic Administrator and Director of Tanglewood, provided opening greetings as the BSO’s representative. Next was a panel discussion on library management, “I Have an MLS, Not an MBA!” Nina Davis-Millis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul Engle, Brockton Public Library; Ruthann McTyre, Yale University; and Holly Mockovak, Boston University, each presented opening thoughts before taking questions from the audience.
Conveniently, the business meeting did not require any votes from the membership. Officers and committee chairs delivered their reports. Outgoing chair Sarah Funke Donovan could only metaphorically pass the gavel to incoming chair Lisa Wollenberg.
The afternoon started with two shorter presentations. New England Conservatory’s Leonard Martin combined his insight as a cataloger with his knowledge of chopped and screwed, vaporwave, and ambient musics to discuss these subgenres and cataloging issues in dealing with musical subgenres. Aaron Bittel and Jennifer Thom Hadley shared their success stories and lessons learned in hosting public events in Wesleyan University’s music library. In lieu of a physical tour, Bridget Carr, Director of Archives and Digital Collections, gave a slideshow overview of the BSO archives.
Setting up a webinar would have required institutional approval, but the ability to immediately schedule a Zoom meeting for up to 300 participants also had the unexpected benefit of allowing full interaction among attendees. With microphones and chat open for informal discussion, we replicated the opening and closing receptions of our in-person meetings, announcing them as BYO bagel and bottle. We took greatest advantage of this for an open session on COVID-19 work, which filled a scheduling gap left by a presentation that could not be shifted online. Members of the program committee moderated the discussion, with participants unmuting to talk and others having a lively chat thread where people shared questions, ideas, and resources. Topics included identifying tasks to keep employees productive from home and lessons learned in the switch to teaching information literacy in an online environment.
We held onto our traditional end-of-meeting concert. Father and daughter Joel and Lily Moerschel performed Duo V from 6 Duos for 2 Cellos, op. 156, by Friedrich August Kummer. The best microphone they had available was less than ideal, so the sound was sometimes glitchy, but it was quite moving that we could all still enjoy live music together, even remotely.
By May it was commonplace for live events of all kinds to switch to remote presentation. But in April, as everything was first shutting down, it was uplifting to pull off the meeting and engage so many of our colleagues in meaningful ways.
NEMLA Town Hall on Racial Justice
Notes submitted by Sarah Funke Donovan
The NEMLA Board hosted a virtual Town Hall meeting for the NEMLA community on Friday, June 26, 2020. The purpose of this meeting was to solicit ideas for action items that our particular community can take in the work against systemic racism. The board has drafted an anti-racism statement and seeks to include specific steps that will effect positive change within our profession and the communities we serve.
Ideas presented at the meeting included the following:
Changing recruitment strategies, such as visiting high schools.
Changing organizational culture, such as individual staff taking responsibility to learn/educate themselves on microaggressions, apologize for mistakes, correct ignorance, and approach conversations with an attitude of humility.
Expanding our understanding of the following:
Modes of teaching
Curriculum
Cataloging language
Highlighted collections
Purchasing decisions
Acceptable formats for purchasing and preservation
Developing an anonymous survey to gather stories on racial experiences within the NEMLA community.
Creating library messaging,website design and programmingthat iswelcoming rather than intimidating.
Developing a personal plan for individual members to work towards addressing anti-Black racism.
Recognizing the systems of which they are a part
Developing a NEMLA plan from individual plans
Setting aside space and time at meetings to discuss advocacy and action.
Including topical presentations and/or outside speaker trainings at meetings.
Providing structure and support for members to advocate within their institutions.
Providing opportunities for education on problematic pieces of music
The NEMLA Program Committee has specifically designated the meetings this year to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism in Music Libraries and our Collections.
At this time, we are seeking proposals for our fall virtual meeting, scheduled to take place online on Friday, October 23, 2020. This one-day conference is an opportunity for New England-based music librarians and library staff to discuss topics related to all aspects of music librarianship and music scholarship.
The Program Committee is especially interested in proposals – either full length (40 min.) or lightning rounds (10-15 min.) – related to the following topics:
Diversity (or the lack thereof) in music librarianship, including topics relating to inclusive descriptive practices, description of world music, collection building, outreach, etc.
Protest music, including protest/parody music (e.g. Randy Rainbow, Tom Lehrer, Bob Marley, Childish Gambino)
Art music by composers from diverse, non-majority groups
Popular musics such as blues, jazz, reggae, hip hop, etc.
Suggestions and best practices for providing remote services to patrons
Proposals for topics not on this list will also be happily considered.
If you would enjoy speaking on one of these topics, or have another topic in mind, please submit your proposal to smalmon@fas.harvard.edu by Friday, August 21, 2020.
For more information, please contact Sandi-Jo Malmon at smalmon@fas.harvard.edu or via phone at (617)-823-3270.
Program committee members:
Sandi-Jo Malmon (chair)
Rebecca McCallum
Jared Rex
Terry Simpkins
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu Office: (860) 768-4840
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Sandi-Jo Malmon Librarian for Collection Development Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 smalmon at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5415
Past Chair: Sarah Funke Donovan Associate Archivist for Digital Assets Boston Symphony Orchestra 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115 sdonovan at bso.org (617) 638-9452
Secretary-Treasurer: Brendan Higgins Faculty Liaison and Outreach Librarian Berklee College of Music 1140 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02215 bhiggins at berklee.edu 617-747-8525
Member-At-Large: Allison Estell Associate Director for Access & Organization Douglas D. Schumann Library & Learning Commons Wentworth Institute of Technology 550 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115 estella at wit.edu (617) 989-4746
Newsletter Editor: Memory Apata Music & Performing Arts Librarian Paddock Music Library Dartmouth College Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755 memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu (603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
It was a great pleasure to see so many NEMLA colleagues at MLA in Norfolk this year! At least 35 members and guests attended our annual NEMLA chapter dinner at the Brick Anchor, and when technical glitches in the kitchen delayed food service, our chapter proved that music librarians can remain congenial even while hungry. I was also quite pleased to see NEMLA members well represented on the national program. Keep an eye out for the call for proposals for MLA 2021 in Cincinnati!
Please mark your calendars for NEMLA’s Spring Meeting on April 17, 2020 here at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Both myself and Bridget Carr, Director of Archives and Digital Collections, have been managing site arrangements. Vice Chair/Program Chair Lisa Wollenberg and the Program Committee have put together an exciting program, so be sure to check out the details below. The meeting will also include our annual business meeting with reports from members of the board. And finally, we will also be announcing election results. As chair of the nominating committee, Marci Cohen has recruited an excellent slate for Vice Chair/Chair-Elect and Member at Large. Please see the candidate biographies in this issue and vote when you receive your ballot.
To be sure that you receive a ballot for this year’s election, please take a moment today to check on your membership status. Please contact Brendan Higgins, Secretary-Treasurer, at bhiggins AT berklee DOT edu to ensure that your membership is up-to-date. You may also check on your membership status by logging into your MLA account. Under “My Profile”, click “Membership Info”.
Respectfully submitted,
Sarah Funke Donovan Chair, New England Music Library Association Associate Archivist for Digital Assets, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Spring 2020 Election Ballot
2020 Election Ballot
On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, at 10:00 a.m., all NEMLA members in good standing will receive an email message inviting them to vote in this year’s election for two positions on NEMLA’s board. Special thanks to all three candidates running for office, and to the Nominating Committee for their diligent work in assembling this slate of candidates.
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect Candidate
Sandi-Jo Malmon currently serves as the Interim Richard F. French Librarian and Librarian for Collection Development at the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University. She has been a NEMLA member since the early 2000s having served a short time as a committee member on the Education and Outreach Committee. She would be delighted to serve as the next Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect.
Sandi-Jo served MLA for nearly a decade as member and chair of the Preservation Committee, and presented papers, organized trainings, speaking panels, tours and events as part of that responsibility. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of the MLA Basic Manual Series (2016-) and has been the MLA Organizational Liaison to the Society of American Music (SAM) since 2012. She has served IAML as a book review editor for Fontes Artis Musicae since 2014. Sandi-Jo received an Artist Diploma in Chamber Music from the Longy School of Music, a Master of Music in cello performance from the New England Conservatory of Music and a Bachelor of Music in cello performance from Oberlin College.
Most recently Sandi-Jo co-presented with Liz Berndt-Morris at the 2019 IAML Conference in Krakow and at the 2020 MLA meeting in Norfolk, VA. about her work Surveying composers: Methods of distribution, discoverability, and accessibility of their works and the corresponding impact on library collections.
Member-at-Large Candidates
Allison Estell is the Associate Director of Access & Organization at Wentworth Institute of Technology; prior roles include Head Librarian for Access & Organization (Wentworth) Learning Commons Librarian (Simmons College), and Library Assistant for Research Services (Simmons). She earned an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, an M.Phil. in Musicology from Yale University, a J.D. from Duke University School of Law, and an A.B. from Middlebury College, where she majored in music. In 2017, she participated in the Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Allison’s musicological research interests include nineteenth-century chamber music, programmatic music, and issues of identity. She has partnered in two international studies on the copyright literacy of librarians and LIS students and has published work on self-directed learning theory in the contexts of professional development and information literacy education. She is a pianist and violist, and has been a member of the Boston Civic Symphony for twelve years. Allison participates in the music library community via her avid readership of the MLA listserv and her memberships in NEMLA (since 2010) and the Boston-Area Music Librarians group (since late 2018). She would welcome the chance to serve NEMLA as the Member-At-Large.
Leo Martin is the Catalog Librarian at the New England Conservatory of Music. Leo has been a member of NEMLA since 2017, and currently serves as their videographer. Leo holds a M.L.S. specializing in Music Librarianship and B.A. in Music Education, both from the University of North Texas. Outside of librarianship, Leo is a freelance bassoonist based out of Boston, dabbles in making zines, and curating music playlists.
Spring 2020 Meeting Information
ADDENDUM, March 12, 2020: Due to the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), NEMLA will transition our spring 2020 meeting to an online Zoom meeting. Details will be announced on the NEMLA listserv and theUpcoming Meetings webpage.
The meeting will take place Friday, April 17, 2020.
Registration
Registration is open for the NEMLA Spring 2020 meeting. Since the meeting will be entirely online, registration is free for all attendees. If you previously paid to register for the in-person meeting, NEMLA will provide a full refund.
We will still arrange for a pre-meeting dinner for those in the Boston area who wish to attend! The dinner will take place Thursday, April 16 at Banyan Bar + Refuge (553 Tremont St.) at 7:00pm. The menu includes vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free options. Please RSVP to Lisa Wollenberg (Lwollenbe at hartford.edu) by Monday, April 13 if you plan to attend.
Meeting Program
This is a preliminary program—please check the Upcoming Meetings page for updates as we finalize the schedule
8:30am – 9:30am: Registration, networking, coffee, and pastries
9:30am – 9:40am: Welcome and Opening Remarks
Sarah Funke Donovan (NEMLA Chair), Associate Archivist for Digital Assets, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Tony Fogg, William I. Bernell Artistic Administrator and Director of Tanglewood, Boston Symphony Orchestra
9:40am – 10:20am: Boston Rock City: A Multi-Library Linked Data Initiative
Christina Linklater, Harvard University
Peter Laurence, Harvard University
Christine Fernsebner Eslao, Harvard University
On Saturday, April 18th, Harvard Library staff will facilitate a public Wikidata edit-a-thon for the Arthur Freedman Collection, an audiovisual archive capturing over four decades of Boston rock music performances. The collection is now fully catalogued and will soon be available to stream online. Harvard Library has already enhanced access and description for this collection by welcoming band members to provide information for finding aids. We now seek to draw on the memories of local music fans to develop a Wikidata presence for the collection.
Three Harvard Library staff members have approached the Arthur Freedman Collection from distinct perspectives, collaborating on a project that will benefit librarianship and Boston rock history. Peter Laurence received the collection, oversaw the creation of metadata, and has reached out to band members for permission to stream their recordings. Christina Linklater is co-curating an exhibition with Peter Laurence, scheduled for 2024 and tentatively titled Boston Rock City. Christine Fernsebner Eslao will speak to her interest in the Freedman collection as material for LD4P (Linked Data for Production), a Mellon-funded project extending far beyond Harvard’s walls, which seeks to enhance library metadata and discovery platforms with linked data, develop new workflows for entity disambiguation, and to expose library collections on the open web.
10:20am – 11:05am: Lightning Presentations
Microgenres: A Cataloger’s Dilemma
Leonard Martin, New England Conservatory of Music
This presentation will give a brief overview of microgenres as a cultural phenomenon, and challenges that catalogers and their institutions encounter with acquiring, cataloging, and circulating microgenre sound recordings. Three case-studies will be presented: Chopped and Screwed (Music), Vaporwave, and Ambient music (Electronica). Each case study will provide historical background on respective microgenre; their cultural significance; and issues/lessons-learned from acquiring, cataloging, and circulating each resource.
Expand Your Music Library’s Space (and Extend Your Collections) with Events
Aaron Bittel, Wesleyan University
Jennifer Thom Hadley, Wesleyan University
Hosting public events in library spaces is a common outreach strategy. It’s also one way in which music libraries can break out of what we may feel are narrowly defined roles. In this lightning talk, we will discuss two recent public event series organized by Wesleyan’s music library, focusing on how these events were designed to strengthen relationships with our user base, promote music collections and services beyond that base, highlight faculty accomplishments, and change the way that everyone from undergraduate students to library administration thinks about library spaces. We will also suggest some practical considerations for putting on successful events with a relatively small team and modest budget.
Updates on Cataloging & Metadata
Members of the NEMLA Technical Services Committee
Every year at the Music Library Association’s annual meeting, the Cataloging and Metadata Committee holds a Town Hall to present the latest developments in how we describe music materials. Since not all NEMLA members can attend the national meeting, the Technical Services committee will present highlights from the CMC Town Hall meeting, as well as any other Technical Services-related sessions that we attend at the annual meeting. Highlights might touch on “Best practices for using LC Medium of Performance Terms,” updates to RDA, “An introduction to LC Faceted Vocabularies for Music Resources,” and so on. The focus will be less on all of the details, and more on what changes to look for and where to go for information.
11:05am – 12:05pm: NEMLA Business Meeting
12:05pm – 1:35pm: Lunch on your own
1:35pm – 2:35pm: I Have an MLS, Not an MBA! A Panel Discussion on Management for Music Librarians
Organized by the NEMLA Program Committee. Panelists to be announced.
Professional librarian job duties often include supervisory responsibilities over professional and paraprofessional staff, student workers, or interns. At the same time, skills for employee management are addressed minimally, if at all, in library school curricula, leaving many librarians feeling ill-prepared to effectively handle the many issues they must tackle. In this session, panelists from diverse managerial backgrounds will share their experience, provide tips and resources for others to improve their skills, and answer all your burning questions! An anonymous submission form for questions will be provided.
2:35pm – 3:15pm: Rainbow Bridge from the Charles: Theodore Thomas’s 1884 Wagner Tour
Andrea Cawelti, Harvard University
In the late nineteenth century, conductor Theodore Thomas was one of the most influential advocates of Richard Wagner’s music in America. He gave the American premieres of many of Wagner’s works, including selections from Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and the Ring Cycle. By continually exposing concert audiences to these challenging new works on tours from New York to San Francisco, Thomas was directly responsible for the rapid spread of Wagner’s popularity across the United States.
One of his most significant Wagner tours started right here in Boston. In April of 1884, returning again in May, he brought his orchestra to Mechanics’ Hall, augmented it with the BSO, and performed excerpts from Wagner’s works exclusively. Materials from the Harvard Theatre Collection, The Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Archives will provide some hint of this grueling three-month Wagner tour.
3:15pm – 4:00pm: Tours of the BSO and Archives
Bridget Carr, Director of Archives and Digital Collections, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Bridget Carr, Director of Archives and Digital Collections, will provide attendees with a tour of Symphony Hall and the BSO archival collections, including Henry Higginson’s sword, the BSO’s Grammy awards, a Symphony Hall toilet paper holder, audio-visual materials, program books (documenting BSO activities as well as Boston Music Hall and Symphony Hall events), scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, architectural plans, a BSO-inspired art collection, an autograph and postcard collection, a photograph collection that contains more than 100,000 images, several manuscript collections that document the life and careers of BSO members, and the BSO’s first official portrait (from 1882).
4:00pm – 4:30pm: Concert
Joel Moerschel, Cellist (retired), Boston Symphony Orchestra
4:30pm – 5:30pm: Closing Reception
Post-Conference Event: Boston Rock City Wikidata Edit-A-Thon
On Saturday, April 18th, Harvard Library and the Boston Public Library are partnering for a guided exploration of Wikidata. NEMLA attendees and friends are warmly welcomed to join us! From 11am to 3pm, we will generate new Wikidata entities using forms supplied by project staff. We’ll learn about ways these can be leveraged to synthesize and visualize data, and meet community members and local library and archives staff who share an interest in data curation.
The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, an audiovisual archive capturing over four decades of Boston rock music performances. Beginning in the late 1970s, Arthur Freedman (born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1957) attended and recorded countless shows, maintaining an enormous archive in his home. In 2012, Arthur Freedman donated his collection to Harvard Library. It is now fully catalogued and will soon be available to stream online.
Harvard Library has enhanced access and description for this collection by welcoming band members to provide setlists, personnel listings and posters that can be used to develop the catalogue records. We now seek to draw on the community knowledge to develop a Wikidata presence for the collection that can be used to synthesize its data into a resource of equal interest to scholars and fans. With this initiative, we are testing ways in which Wikidata and other open, structured data repositories can be used to cultivate and capture community knowledge.
No previous Wikidata experience, music-reading ability, or Boston rock knowledge are required. Join us at 10am to enjoy complimentary coffee and pastries as we listen to tracks from the Freedman Collection, then edit from 11am to 3pm, dropping in and out or staying for the whole session if you choose.
Ready to sign up? Go to our Eventbrite page to reserve your spot! If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Christina Linklater (linklat at fas.harvard.edu). And if you can’t make it, you’ll get to hear Christina and her colleagues Christine Fernsebner Eslao and Peter Laurence give a talk about this work at the NEMLA meeting the day before.
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Sarah Funke Donovan Associate Archivist for Digital Assets Boston Symphony Orchestra 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115 sdonovan at bso.org (617) 638-9452
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu Office: (860) 768-4840
Past Chair: Marci Cohen Assistant Head Music Library Boston University 771 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA 02215 mcohen2 at bu.edu (617) 353-3707
Secretary-Treasurer: Brendan Higgins Faculty Liaison and Outreach Librarian Berklee College of Music 1140 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02215 bhiggins at berklee.edu 617-747-8525
Member-At-Large: Patricia (Tish) Brennan Associate Professor/Head of Reference James P. Adams Library Rhode Island College 600 Mt Pleasant Ave Providence, RI 02908 pbrennan at ric.edu(401) 456-2810
Newsletter Editor: Memory Apata Music & Performing Arts Librarian Paddock Music Library Dartmouth College Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755 memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu (603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
Greetings from snowy Boston! I hope that you are able to stay cozy and warm and maybe even enjoy a snow day or two as we say farewell to Fall and dive (ski?) straight into Winter.
Speaking of Fall, we had a fantastic meeting at Manchester City Library in Manchester, NH on Friday, October 18, 2019. From its massive wrought-iron gates to its soaring rotunda dome, the early 20th-century building lent an impressive backdrop to the proceedings. The sessions covered a range of topics, including Puerto Rican protest music, Northeastern University’s recording studios, NEMLA’s working group for creating an online music librarianship course, and the Josten Library’s development of a 360 degree orientation tour. The sessions were followed by two performances that mixed music with tech, acrobatics, dance, acting, and a great deal of humor. Thanks so much to the Program Committee for organizing such an excellent event!
If you missed the Fall meeting, or are simply counting down the days till you can see your NEMLA colleagues again, please mark your calendars for April 17, 2020 at the Boston Symphony Orchestra! More details will be forthcoming, so please keep your eye out for further announcements. And for those attending MLA’s meeting in Norfolk, VA, please see below for another opportunity to socialize with the NEMLA crowd.
I would also like to remind any and all members to renew their membership via the MLA website, if you haven’t already done so. Don’t miss out on staying connected with your New England colleagues!
If you have any trouble renewing your membership, please email our Secretary-Treasurer, Brendan Higgins ( bhiggins AT berklee DOT edu ).
Finally, I would like to provide an update on the NEMLA Donation Match Challenge. In April, Marci Cohen (previous Chair) issued a call for donations to MLA’s Paraprofessional/Public Librarian Travel Fund Endowment Campaign, promising a match from NEMLA of up to $500. I am pleased to report that we received $300 in donations, and will be submitting the NEMLA match of $300 to MLA soon. Thank you for your generosity!
Respectfully submitted,
Sarah Funke Donovan, Chair, New England Music Library Association Associate Archivist for Digital Assets, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Chapter Dinner at Norfolk Meeting
Are you attending the MLA annual meeting in Norfolk, VA? In lieu of a chapter meeting, we’ll have a chapter dinner on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 7:00pm at Brick Anchor Brew-House, 241 Granby Street. This brew-pub with a steampunk vibe has vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options and can accommodate our need for separate checks. It is about a 5-minute walk from the host hotel. Either meet us in the Hilton lobby at 6:45pm to walk there with the group or meet us at the restaurant for a 7:00pm reservation. RSVP by Thursday, Feb. 20 to Sarah Funke Donovan, sdonovan@bso.org .
Submitted by Brendan Higgins, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
Membership
Thanks to all who have renewed their memberships through registration transition in July. We currently have 52 active members, who have officially registered through the MLA website. If you have any questions about the status of your membership or the current process, please email Brendan Higgins at nemlaboard@gmail.com.
Fall Meeting
There were 26 registered attendees for the fall meeting, including one student. There were 5 first-time attendees.
Fall Meeting Income
25 regular registrations: $496.00
1 student registration: $8.00
Total: $481.12 (minus Paypal fees)
Fall Meeting Expenses
Performer Honoraria: $100.00
Food: $533.06
Total: $633.06 (net loss $151.94)
Fall 2019 Meeting Minutes
Submitted by Memory Apata
On Friday, October 18th, 2019, the NEMLA membership held its annual fall meeting at the Manchester City Library in Manchester, New Hampshire. The membership was greeted by the library’s staff who pointed out the building’s historic architecture, including the gorgeous auditorium in which the meeting was held. Library staff have dubbed the building “the jewel in the crown of the Queen City,” and noted its special collections in music, art, and genealogy.
Following this welcome, the meeting commenced with a presentation by new member, Adaliz Cruz, titled “Music: The Weapon of Choice.” Cruz traced musical protest movements in Puerto Rico surrounding the #RickyRenuncia campaign of Summer 2019, during which citizens called for the resignation of several top government officials. Adaliz showed that protests against corruption were exhibited at every level of Puerto Rican musical heritage. She presented a smorgasbord of Puerto Rican musical styles involved in the movement including salsa, reggaeton, pop, bomba, danza, bolero, and many others. She concluded the presentation with a call to librarians to collect Puerto Rican music to preserve its cultural history.
After the lunch break, committee meetings were held and openings for each committee were determined. For those interested in future service on NEMLA committees, please see the call for nominees later in this newsletter.
The afternoon’s program included three lightning sessions of around ten minutes each. The first was given by Debra Mandel of Northeastern University, who showcased her library’s new recording studio. For an update on the progress of this new addition, please see her announcement in the Noteworthy News section of this newsletter. Next on the agenda was the announcement of a new NEMLA education initiative, presented by Liz Berndt-Morris of Harvard and Memory Apata of Dartmouth. They shared that NEMLA is exploring opportunities to partner with library schools in New England to ensure an annual course offering in music librarianship. The last lightning session was given by Marlene Wong of Smith College. Her enlightening session showed how an academic library with tricky architecture can overcome low visibility on campus through accessibility improvements including better signage and digital mapping.
With the presentations finished, the stage was set for two performers working between the disciplines of music and circus. Neil Parsons showcased novel interpretations of musical scores, incorporating moments of humor, movement, and audience interaction. His rendition of an excerpt from Cardew’s Treatise was particularly notable for its use of trombone as dance partner. Lastly, Christiana Rose, a graduate student in the Dartmouth Digital Musics program, presented two original compositions for acrobat and electronics. Her pieces used motion tracking technologies to coordinate sonic cues as she tumbled, balanced, and inverted. The performance was followed by a short reception in the library.
The 2020 NEMLA Spring Meeting will take place Friday, April 17, 2020 at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As part of the meeting, Bridget Carr, Director of Archives and Digital Collections, will provide attendees with a tour of Symphony Hall and the BSO archival collections, including Henry Higginson’s sword, the BSO’s Grammy awards, a Symphony Hall toilet paper holder, audio-visual materials, program books (documenting BSO activities as well as Boston Music Hall and Symphony Hall events), scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, architectural plans, a BSO-inspired art collection, an autograph and postcard collection, a photograph collection that contains more than 100,000 images, several manuscript collections that document the life and careers of BSO members, and the BSO’s first official portrait (from 1882).
More details will be announced on the NEMLA listserv and website in the coming months. If you have any questions about the meeting, please contact Lisa Wollenberg (Lwollenbe at hartford.edu).
Call for Proposals
The NEMLA Program Committee is currently accepting proposals for our spring meeting at the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Friday, April 17, 2020. We welcome submissions for lightning round and full-length presentations or panels explaining and raising awareness of your recent projects, research, initiatives, etc., relating to music and to the profession of music librarianship—anything you think would benefit Chapter members and their constituencies.
Regular presentations should be 30–35 minutes in length. Lightning round presentations should be 8-12 minutes in length.
Proposals must include:
Name(s) and affiliation(s) of presenters/panelists
Contact information (e-mail and telephone number)
Title of presentation/panel
Type of presentation/panel (full-length presentation, panel, or lightning round)
An abstract of 100-300 words
List of any equipment required beyond a computer, Internet access, projector, and speakers
Please send proposals via e-mail to the Program Committee Chair, Lisa Wollenberg (Lwollenbe at hartford.edu). In your submission e-mail, please use the subject line: “NEMLA Spring 2020 Proposal.”
The proposal deadline is Friday, January 31, 2020. Accepted presenters will be notified of their status by Friday, February 21, 2020.
NEMLA Program Committee Lisa Wollenberg (Chair) Rebecca McCallum Zoë Rath
Call for Nominations
Dear NEMLA membership,
We are now accepting nominations for the following officer positions on the NEMLA Board:
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect:
Performs the duties of the Chair in the latter’s absence.
Serves as Chair of the Program Committee.
Also serves as an ex-officio member of the Education & Outreach Committee.
The term of office shall be one year after which the Vice-Chair shall succeed to the office of Chair and then Past-Chair, meaning a commitment of three years.
Member-at-Large:
Acts as liaison to relevant professional organizations in New England (such as the New England Library Association (NELA),the six state library associations, the New England chapter of ACRL (ACRL/NEC), and the New England chapter of the American Musicological Society) primarily to promote information exchange and outreach.
Also serves as Chair of the Education & Outreach Committee.
The term of office shall be two years.
Members must be in good standing and current with their dues. Nominations are welcome through January 21, 2020.
If you would like to nominate a fellow NEMLA member for one of these positions (self-nominations are welcome) or if you have any questions, please contact the Nominating Committee members:
Marci Cohen, nominating committee chair (mcohen2@bu.edu) Adaliz Cruz, adaliz.cruz@simmons.edu Michael Rogan, mrogan01@gmail.com Chris Schiff, cschiff@bates.edu
Noteworthy News
Northeastern University Library’s Recording Studio Launches New Live Streaming Service
Digital Media and Video Coordinator Antonio Banrey introduces Petrina Danardatu
On November 21, Northeastern’s newly inaugurated recording studio streamed its first live concert. Performers included talented guitarist and songwriter Petrina Danardatu, a first-year Journalism and English student, who celebrated International Education Week with a 30-minute “Songs of Love” concert. Her soulful set included tunes by Sam Cooke, Daniel Johnston, Lana Del Ray and two originals. The video was viewable live on the library’s Facebook page, and archived in the digital repository.
Three staff successfully and smoothly engineered the session using three video cameras.
More Recording Studio music performances will be scheduled in the new year.
Submitted by Debra Mandel, Director, Recording Studios, Northeastern University Library, d.mandel AT northeastern DOT edu, 617-373-4902
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Sarah Funke Donovan Associate Archivist for Digital Assets Boston Symphony Orchestra 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115 sdonovan at bso.org (617) 638-9452
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu Office: (860) 768-4840
Past Chair: Marci Cohen Assistant Head Music Library Boston University 771 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA 02215 mcohen2 at bu.edu (617) 353-3707
Secretary-Treasurer: Brendan Higgins Faculty Liaison and Outreach Librarian Berklee College of Music 1140 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02215 bhiggins at berklee.edu 617-747-8525
Member-At-Large: Patricia (Tish) Brennan Associate Professor/Head of Reference James P. Adams Library Rhode Island College 600 Mt Pleasant Ave Providence, RI 02908 pbrennan at ric.edu(401) 456-2810
Newsletter Editor: Memory Apata Music & Performing Arts Librarian Paddock Music Library Dartmouth College Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755 memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu (603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
Greetings! I hope the summer months have been relaxing and restorative, even
as Fall lurks just around the corner. But along with colorful leaves and cooler
temps comes another opportunity to attend a NEMLA meeting. I am excited to
announce that our Fall 2019 meeting will be at Manchester City Library in
Manchester, NH on Friday, October 18, 2019. Our Program Chair, Lisa Wollenberg,
has already issued a call for proposals, with a particular interest in
lightning talks. If you have just completed an interesting project or research,
but want a more concise format in which to share with your colleagues, I highly
encourage you to submit a lightning talk proposal!
In case you missed the Spring 2019 meeting, please join me in congratulating the winners of the 2019 Election: Brendan Higgins, our new Secretary-Treasurer, and Lisa Wollenberg, our new Vice Chair/Chair Elect. Many thanks to Jared Rex for assembling a fantastic slate of candidates! Our new officers have already dived into their roles with gusto, and I am especially grateful to outgoing Secretary-Treasurer Alan Karass, both for his past two years of service, and for his efforts in smoothing the hand-off process. Thanks are also due to my predecessor Marci Cohen who, along with Holly Mockovak, served as our site host at the 2019 Spring Meeting at Boston University while juggling her final duties as NEMLA Chair. I am grateful we will still benefit from Marci’s expertise for one more year as she transitions to Past Chair.
As a result of a bylaws change at the Spring 2019 meeting, NEMLA’s new fiscal year is July 1st-June 30th, in order to align with the fiscal year of MLA. We can now bundle our membership renewal into their system. Please bear with us as we transition to MLA’s system. For those of you who have opted for the three-year membership package in the past, you should receive a discount code that will allow you to register in MLA’s system and receive credit for any remaining years of membership. If you have any trouble renewing your membership or applying the discount code, please email our Secretary-Treasurer, Brendan Higgins ( bhiggins AT berklee DOT edu ).
Finally, I would like to provide an update on the NEMLA Donation Match
Challenge. In April, Marci issued a call for donations to MLA’s
Paraprofessional/Public Librarian Travel Fund Endowment Campaign, promising a
match from NEMLA of up to $500. I am pleased to report that we have already
received $250, and hope to fully make our match goal by September 15, 2019.
To participate in the chapter challenge, you can either donate online on the MLA website or send a check payable to the Music Library Association to NEMLA secretary/treasurer Brendan Higgins, Boston Conservatory at Berklee College of Music, 8 Fenway, Boston, MA 02115. Include a note that it is for the Paraprofessional/Public Librarian Fundraising Challenge. If you donate on the MLA website, please include a note that it is for the NEMLA Chapter Challenge AND forward a copy of your receipt (the one from MLA showing the fund, not the one from BluePay that just shows a payment) to Brendan (bhiggins AT berklee DOT edu).
Respectfully submitted,
Sarah Funke Donovan, Chair, New England Music Library Association Associate Archivist for Digital Assets, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Spring 2019 Meeting Summary
31 May, 2019
Mugar Library, Boston University
Submitted jointly by Tish Brennan, Member-at-Large and Memory Apata, Newsletter Editor
Opening remarks were offered by Boston University’s (BU) Associate University Librarian for Undergraduate & Distance Learning, Tom Casserly. Casserly noted the integral role of the College of Fine Arts and the Conservatory, as they are key to and a fundamental part of the student experience at BU. He remarked on the Music Library’s strong and distinctive program and key support function in relation to the School of Music, particularly noting the rebalancing of the music canon through data-driven analysis.
Following these remarks, Sarah Funke Donovan introduced Jody Cormack and Alec McLane of Wesleyan University, who presented “Folk music and the environment: Preservation of the Hudson River Folk Festival Recordings.” Jody and Alec recounted the history of the Great Hudson River Revival Festival and the Bear Mountain Festival of World Music and Dance, the former of which was organized by Pete Seeger. Both festivals produced recordings of folk music and singer-songwriters of the era. Phil Ciganer, founder to the Towne Crier Café, donated these recordings (previously held at Vassar) to Wesleyan. Wesleyan offered a climate controlled space at the Music Library along with occasional graduate student help to preserve the collection. A Recordings at Risk grant was obtained in 2017 to ensure preservation. Despite the work being done, there are still barriers to public access because Ciganer only obtained verbal agreements before recording artists. The arbiters of the preservation project are trying to contact artists for permission. It is Ciganer’s hope that the content can be used to create a product which could be monetized, such as an anthology.
Next on the morning’s program was “Brave, Noisy World: Community Conversation in the Music Library,” by Memory Apata of Dartmouth College. Apata used Christopher Small’s concept of musicking and William Cheng’s concept of reparative musicology to design an outreach event on the topic of civil rights music. The events have been held on Fridays in January in the Paddock Music Library as part of the month-long celebration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. at Dartmouth. To guide group conversation at the Sing-Ins, the brave space model of Kristi Clemens and Brian Arao was adopted. The rules of brave spaces include discussing controversy with civility, owning intentions and impact, and accepting challenges by choice. Apata discussed the challenges of teaching music of the civil rights movement as a white person and recommended reading for librarians intending to host discussions on the topic of race, including White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, Mindful of Race by Ruth King, and Well That Escalated Quickly by Franchesca Ramsey. To conclude the presentation, attendees participated in the singing of “This Little Light of Mine” adapted with lyrics pertaining to libraries. This presentation will be given at MLA 2019 in Norfolk, VA as a recipient of the MLA Best of Chapters award.
After Memory Apata’s presentation, we learned about a new music data repository and music encoding initiative (MEI) out of Boston College in a presentation titled “Rebalancing the Music Canon & MEI Workflow.” There, Anna Kijas and Sarah Melton are making musical examples from the works of underrepresented composers machine-readable. While the work of scholars is unearthing more of these musical excerpts for viewing and listening, such examples are not in a format which can be manipulated or used as a part of a larger comparative data set. Kijas emphasized that training students to complete this work is vital for computational musicology in the future and it is students who are carrying out much of the work of this project. The workflow involves extracting and correcting notation using SMARTScore. After presenting, Kijas and Melton led an activity to demonstrate some of the skills needed to perform the work of a project like this.
The NEMLA business meeting was held following the lunch break. Committee openings were announced, including positions on the Oral History, Outreach, Program, and Technical Services committees. Members wishing to join any of the above may find contact information for committee chairs on the NEMLA website. Alan Karass gave the Secretary/Treasurer’s report, an updated version of which appears later in this newsletter.
Marci Cohen gave the Chair’s report, including a call to members to get involved with the organization through committee work and collaboration with colleagues. She emphasized that NEMLA offers low membership fees but high engagement and encouraged attendees to make the most of their membership. Cohen praised the NEMLA board, stating that the group was effective and respectful, and encouraging those interested in running for office in the coming year to do so.
When these remarks were finished, the assembly voted on a proposed bylaws change which would allow for the NEMLA membership renewal process to align with the MLA process. The resolution passed without objection.
At this point Marci announced election results, welcoming Brendan Higgins as Secretary/Treasurer and Lisa Wollenberg as Vice Chair/Chair Elect. The gavel was then handed over to incoming Chair, Sarah Funke Donovan, who called for new and old business. Upon hearing that there was none, she thanked the Past Chair for two years of excellent work and adjourned the meeting.
The final presentation on the program was given by Lisa Wollenberg of the University of Hartford. The presentation was titled “Too Many Students and Not Enough Time: Solving Practical Challenges with Augmented Reality Library Tours.” Wollenberg explained that the University of Hartford is home to seven thousand graduate and undergraduate students, all of whom must take an information literacy course in their first semester, including a library tour. To accommodate the large number of students, an online module for information literacy has been in place for the past ten years while in-person tours continued. The tours created a lot of work for library staff, who had to organize, lead, and schedule them. Wollenberg solved this problem by designing a self-led library tour using ARIS, an open-source program for creating augmented reality experiences using mobile GPS and QR codes. Students may access the tour via their own mobile devices or by borrowing the library’s iPad. The self-led tours take 15-20 minutes to complete and have lessened the workload on staff.
To conclude the program, attendees took a tour of the Mugar Library and enjoyed a concert by vocal group, Sourcework. A reception was held at Sunset Cantina.
Recordings of the proceedings for this meeting may be found on NEMLA’s YouTube channel.
Secretary/Treasurer’s Report
Balances(7/30/19)
Checking:
$4,580.12
Savings: $4,006.20
Total: $8,586.32
Oral History Grant
Beginning amount $1,000
Expenses since 2015: $549.49
Current remaining: $450.51
MLA Paraprofessional/Public Librarian Travel Fund
Current donations: $250 to MLA
Checking
Account
Restricted funds (grant): $450.51
Unrestricted/NEMLA (non-grant):
$4,129.61
November 2018 Meeting
Expenses: net loss $352.03
Registrations: 29
June 2019 Meeting
Expenses: $302.40
First-time attendees: 8
Registrations: 65
Current Membership
Previous count of active members was 93
37 have officially renewed with MLA (4 new members)
15 have paid in advance, but have not renewed in the MLA site
30 have not renewed but were active last year
Fall 2019 Meeting Preview
The fall 2019 NEMLA meeting will take place at the Manchester City Library in Manchester, NH on Friday, October 18, 2019. Manchester, NH is the largest city in northern New England and is home to a variety of local restaurants, concert venues, museums, and more. The Manchester City Library was founded in 1854 and currently houses over 350,000 volumes, making it one of New Hampshire’s largest collections. The Main Branch of the library has been located in the Carpenter Memorial Building (listed on the National Register of Historic Places) since 1914. The last time NEMLA met at a public library was for our fall 2014 meeting at Boston Public Library, and we are excited for this opportunity to reach out to public librarians in our region!
First-time
registration: Free
Regular registration: $18 early bird / $20 after Oct. 11
Student registration: $9 early bird / $10 after Oct. 11 Early Bird
Registration Deadline: October 11, 2019
Manchester City Library
NEMLA is
proud to offer free meeting registration
to all who have not attended a NEMLA meeting in the past, regardless of NEMLA
membership status. In addition, we welcome applications for our First-Time
Attendees Travel Grant to assist with travel expenses. Follow this link to
apply for the grant: http://bit.ly/nemla1st.
The deadline for applications is October 11, 2019.
Stay tuned
to the NEMLA
listserv and/or the Upcoming
Meetings webpage for forthcoming information on travel, hotels,
pre-conference dinner, and more. If you have questions, contact Lisa Wollenberg
(Lwollenbe at hartford.edu)
Call for Proposals
The New
England Chapter of the Music Library Association (NEMLA) is currently accepting
proposals for our fall meeting at the Manchester City Library in Manchester, NH
on Friday, October 18, 2019. We now
invite lightning round proposals in addition to regular presentation and
panel proposals.
We welcome
submissions explaining and raising awareness of your recent projects, research,
innovations, discoveries, etc., relating to music and to the profession of
music librarianship—anything you think would benefit Chapter members and their
constituencies.
Regular presentations should be 30–35 minutes in length. Lightning round presentations should be 8-12 minutes in length.
Proposals must include:
Name(s) and affiliation(s) of presenters/panelists
Contact information (e-mail and telephone number)
Title of presentation/panel
Type of presentation/panel (regular presentation, panel, or lightning round)
An abstract of 100-300 words
List of any equipment required beyond a computer, Internet access, projector, and speakers
Please send proposals via e-mail to the Program Committee Chair, Lisa Wollenberg (Lwollenbe at hartford.edu). In your submission e-mail, please use the subject line: “NEMLA Fall 2019 Proposal.” The proposal deadline has been extended to Tuesday, September 3, 2019. Accepted presenters will be notified of their status by Friday, September 20, 2019.
NEMLA Program Committee: Lisa Wollenberg (Chair), Sara White, Zoë Rath, Rebecca McCallum
Special thanks
to the program committee and to Manchester City Library staff for hosting us.
Lisa Wollenberg, Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, Public Services Librarian, Allen Library, University of Hartford, (860)-768-4840, Lwollenbe at hartford.edu
NEMLA Officers
Chair: Sarah Funke Donovan Associate Archivist for Digital Assets Boston Symphony Orchestra 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115 sdonovan at bso.org (617) 638-9452
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Lisa Wollenberg Public Services Librarian Allen Library University of Hartford 200 Bloomfield Ave West Hartford, CT 06117 lwollenbe at hartford.edu Office: (860) 768-4840
Past Chair: Marci Cohen Assistant Head Music Library Boston University 771 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA 02215 mcohen2 at bu.edu (617) 353-3707
Secretary-Treasurer: Brendan Higgins Faculty Liaison and Outreach Librarian Berklee College of Music 1140 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02215 bhiggins at berklee.edu 617-747-8525
Member-At-Large: Patricia (Tish) Brennan Associate Professor/Head of Reference James P. Adams Library Rhode Island College 600 Mt Pleasant Ave Providence, RI 02908 pbrennan at ric.edu(401) 456-2810
Newsletter Editor: Memory Apata Music & Performing Arts Librarian Paddock Music Library Dartmouth College Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755 memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu (603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist: Emily Levine Reference Librarian Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington St Brookline, MA 02445 elevine at minlib.net (617) 730-2370
Website Editor: Liz Berndt-Morris Music Reference and Research Services Librarian Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library Harvard University 3 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 eaberndtmorris at fas.harvard.edu (617) 998-5310
It was great seeing so many of our chapter members at the MLA meeting in St. Louis in February. We had a convivial chapter dinner, and I was proud to see so many of our members as presenters, organizers, and performers. The call for proposals for the 2020 MLA meeting in Norfolk, VA is now open. Once again, I urge all chapter members to consider proposing sessions. If you are new to the process and you’d like some guidance, please contact me for help. I’ve shepherded many proposals through the process and presented many times. I’d be honored to aid other members to ensure that our chapter is well-represented at next year’s event.
Coming sooner than the MLA annual meeting is our chapter’s spring meeting on May 31, here at my own institution, Boston University. Holly Mockovak, head of the music library, has been coordinating site arrangements. Vice chair/program chair Sarah Funke Donovan has assembled an outstanding program. The program will also include our annual business meeting, regarding several important votes. First, we will be announcing election results. As chair of the nominating committee, Jared Rex has recruited an impressive slate for vice chair/chair-elect and secretary-treasurer. Please see the candidate biographies in this issue and vote when you receive your ballot. At the meeting, we will also hold a discussion and vote on a proposed by-laws change regarding our fiscal year. The proposed change and rationale appear in this issue.
Finally, I’m pleased to include the abridged transcript of my utterly delightful oral history interview with Tish Brennan. Tish provided an anecdotal overview of her career and experiences with NEMLA, MLA and music libraries in New England with plenty of rich details, warmth, and humor. I thoroughly enjoyed reliving our conversation when editing down the transcript of our hour-and-a-half conversation, and I appreciate that our oral history efforts gave me the opportunity to get to know this charming person better.
Respectfully submitted,
Marci Cohen, Chair, New England Music Library Association
Assistant Head, Music Library, Boston University
…
Spring 2019 Election Ballot
On Monday, April 29, 2019, at 10:00 a.m., all NEMLA members in good standing will receive an email message inviting them to vote in this year’s election for two positions on NEMLA’s board. Special thanks to all three candidates running for office, and to the Nominating Committee for their diligent work in assembling this slate of candidates.
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect Candidates
Lisa Wollenberg has been a NEMLA member since 2017, currently serves as NEMLA’s Website Editor, and would be delighted to serve as the next Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect. She works as the Public Services Librarian for the Allen Library at the University of Hartford. Before moving to New England, Lisa was the Stacks Coordinator and Circulation Supervisor for the Cook Music Library at Indiana University, and was an active member of the Midwest Chapter of MLA. She co-presented at the 2016 Midwest Chapter meeting and co-presented a poster at the 2017 MLA meeting, both about her work with the Leonard Bernstein collection at Indiana University. She has also recently been appointed to the MLA Instruction Subcommittee. Lisa holds an M.L.S. and M.A. (Musicology) from Indiana University and a B.A. (Music History) from The College of Wooster.
Secretary-Treasurer Candidates
Carol Lubkowski is the Music Librarian at Wellesley College; previously, she was the Public Services Librarian at the University of Hartford’s Allen Library. She would be very excited to serve NEMLA as Secretary/Treasurer. Carol received her BA in music from Wesleyan University, her MM in music composition from The Boston Conservatory, and her MLS from Indiana University. Carol is currently the coordinator for MLA’s Contemporary Music Interest Group. At MLA 2016, she and Misti Shaw presented “How Much of BML4 is Available Online? Some Genre/Format Preliminary Findings”. Carol has also published three reviews in Notes. Her interests are the music of living women composers, feminist punk music, and the future of audio recordings in libraries.
Brendan Higgins is the Public Services Librarian and Archivist for the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, a position he has held since 2014. Prior to that, he worked as their library’s evening supervisor for four years as a paraprofessional while finishing his library degree from Simmons. He started his library career at the Conservatory directly after finishing a Masters in Music History at Tufts University and he holds an undergraduate degree in Music Education from Berklee College of Music. Brendan encountered NEMLA in his first year at the Conservatory, when the spring 2011 meeting was jointly held at the Boston Conservatory and Berklee. He has served as the group’s videographer since 2015 and has been an active member of MLA, currently serving the Career Development and Services committee as a coordinator of the New Members Forum. When he’s not wearing his multiple hats in the library, he enjoys baking, playing bass, and making music with his partner.
Spring Meeting Information
Registration
Registration is now open for NEMLA’s Spring 2019 Meeting! The meeting will be held at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library in Boston, Massachusetts on May 31, 2019. We will be meeting in the PAL Lounge, on the third floor.
Regular registration: $18 early bird /$20 (after May 24)
Student registration: $9 early bird/$10 (after May 24)
Early Bird Registration Deadline: May 24, 2019
The exterior of Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, which houses the Music Library. Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mugar_Memorial_Library_Exterior.jpg
Program
A preliminary schedule is available, but please check back for updates as the schedule becomes finalized.
9:00 am – 9:45 am: Registration; coffee and pastries
9:45 am – 10:00 am: Opening Remarks (speakers TBD)
10:00 am – 10:40 am:Folk music and the environment: Preservation of the Hudson River Folk Festival Recordings by Alec McLane, Wesleyan University, and co-presenter TBA
Wesleyan’s World Music Archives hold 30 years of recordings deposited by Phil Ciganer, the owner of the Towne Crier Cafe (formerly in Pawling, NY, since relocated to Beacon, NY). For the Recordings at Risk project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, we targeted a subset of these for digitization and preservation: approximately 243 hours of audio recordings on cassette and reel tape from the Great Hudson River Revival festival and the Bear Mountain Festival of World Music and Dance. The first of these festivals was part of Pete Seeger’s Clearwater project, raising awareness of environmental pollution in the Hudson River Valley, and both festivals were recorded under the supervision of Ciganer between 1978 and 1982, featuring prominent figures in the American folk music and singer-songwriter scene, as well as numerous other performers from around the world. After a failed application for a pilot grant in 2017 we applied again for the third round in February 2018, and were awarded the grant in April, with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) as our designated vendor. The digitization was completed in late 2018 and, while questions of online access to the collection are still to be addressed, there is abundant material for a presentation on the grant application process, the digitization, subsequent quality control and ingestion, and of course the music itself.
10:40 am – 11:20 am:Brave, Noisy World: Community Conversation in the Music Library by Memory Apata, Dartmouth College
Music Librarians are uniquely trained in active listening in both music and library contexts. These listening skills enable us to do the work of reparative musicology, which involves the facilitation of social repair through the study and practice of music. The
Friday Night Sing-Ins at Dartmouth College’s Paddock Music Library were an example of reparative musicology. Following a year of hate-filled campaign rhetoric, heightened racial tension, and mass protests on campus, the library hosted a forum to discuss
these issues within the context of music. Participants sang the songs of the civil rights movement and examined the music’s history and performance contexts at protests in the U.S. and abroad.
Through the Sing-Ins, the library inadvertently became a “brave space,” a term which has emerged in opposition to so-called “safe spaces.” Safe spaces are understood to be places (either physical or conceptual) where marginalized students can have a break
from the labor of fielding frequent questions about their backgrounds and experiences. A brave space challenges the idea of safe discussions, and is instead a place wherein individuals are encouraged to openly share their opinions and be challenged by those who do not share similar stances. At the Sing-Ins, attendees’ opinions on current events were brought out into the open through their discussion and performance of protest songs. Library staff sparked these conversations by selecting provocative repertoire and connecting the discussion to the music.
As the annual event has grown, we have worked to create a balance between safety and braveness in our space. In this presentation I discuss lessons learned, including several mistakes we have made in designing the event and how we have dealt with microaggressions. I show how music librarians can and perhaps should be activists for social justice.
11:20 am – 12:00 pm:Rebalancing the Music Canon & MEI Workflow by Anna Kijas, Boston College and Sarah Melton, Boston College
At Boston College Libraries, we are developing a Rebalancing the Music Canon music data repository focused on works by un(der)-represented people. The aim is to decenter the musical canon and make data-driven music scholarship more diverse and inclusive.
We are beginning with a small corpus (about 178 pieces) shared by the Music Theory Examples by Women (MTEW) project. Their work includes the compilation of excerpts and complete musical compositions by women composers, including women of color. A key
part of this project has been developing a workflow and process that can be replicated by students, staff, and other collaborators. With her colleague Raffaele Viglianti (UMD/MITH), Anna has developed a tutorial (forthcoming via DLF Library Pedagogy Cookbook that will
incorporate this workflow and provide greater detail about how to create MEI XML files with a specific focus on metadata and enhancing the transcribed music notation for people
working with metadata, digital libraries, and digital preservation. In the presentation, we will first discuss the Rebalancing the Music Canon project and present the workflow being used with our students and staff who are involved in extracting, correcting, and encoding the music data. This will include a brief demo of the workflow and examples from our work.
The second part of this presentation will be a hands-on (paper and pencil) document analysis mark-up exercise that will get participants to consider the elements and attributes that can be encoded from a musical notation document.
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm: Lunch on your own
1:30 pm – 2:00 pm: Business Meeting
2:00 pm – 2:40 pm: Too Many Students and Not Enough Time: Solving Practical Challenges with Augmented Reality Library Tours by Lisa Wollenberg, University of Hartford
How do you give customized library tours to 150 students in an online class? All first-year performing arts majors at the University of Hartford are enrolled in HLM020, an online information literacy course taught by the Allen Library (music & dance) Public Services Librarian. A library tour assignment was desired as part of the course, but was difficult to incorporate for many reasons: there were typically 130-150 students enrolled, the course had no prescribed in-person class times, and arranging in-person tours was difficult given students’ already busy and varied schedules. In addition, the tours needed to be customized to point out the most important resources for students’ individual fields of study, spanning multiple music majors plus jazz, dance, actor training, musical theatre, music production & technology, and music management. As a solution, augmented reality tours were created using ARIS, a free open-source platform. Students were able to independently visit the library on their own time and take a tour using the ARIS app on their iPhone or one of the library’s loaning iPads. The students followed a virtual tour guide in the ARIS app which led them to various library spaces and important resources for their chosen major. The presenter will share a short demo “tour” for participants to test during the presentation, as well as tips for setting up new tours in the ARIS Editor. She will also discuss some of the challenges and solutions for using ARIS and other augmented reality tools, plus ideas for further applications of this technology.
2:45 pm – 3:25 pm: Tours of Mugar Library
3:30 pm – 4:15 pm: Concert
4:15 pm – 5:30 pm: Reception at Sunset Cantina, 916 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA. Cash bar.
Thursday Night Dinner
If you will be in Boston on Thursday evening, we invite you to join us at The Yard House (126 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, 617-236-4083) on May 30th, 2019 at6:30pm. Please RSVP to Sarah Funke Donovan (sdonovan at bso.org) if you plan to attend.
BU also has a list of additional hotels nearby or accessible via public transit.
Transportation
Attendees are encouraged to take public transportation. Boston University has public transit and driving directions to campus. The closest T stop is BU Central on the Green B line. Several bus routes also service the area; the 47, 57 and CT-2 have the closest stops.
Parking
There are two parking options somewhat close to the BU campus.
Granby Lot (N), 665 Commonwealth Ave.: About a 10-minute walk and costs $17
If this is your first NEMLA meeting, we welcome you to take advantage of our First-Time Attendees Program! Regardless of whether you are a member or not, the registration fee is waived for first-time attendees. We also welcome you to apply for our First-Time Attendees Travel Grant, for assistance with travel expenses. The deadline to apply for funding through this program is May 24, 2019. To register as a first-time attendee and/or apply for travel assistance, please click here. Also note that funding for travel assistance is regrettably not available for all first-time attendees, but we do strive to accommodate as many as we can on a first-come, first-served basis.
Welcoming First-Time Attendees
Would you like to help a first-time attendee feel more welcome at their first meeting? We are looking for hosts to aid newcomers in getting to know our organization and its members. The time commitment is very low. You will be paired with a first-time attendee to either introduce them to people during the registration/coffee period in the morning or have them accompany you to lunch. (You are not responsible for paying for their lunch.) Please email Sarah Funke Donovan (sdonovan at bso.org) by Monday, May 20th, 2019 to volunteer.
NEMLA By-Laws Proposed Change
Regarding Fiscal Year for Vote at Spring 2019 Meeting
Existing article
ARTICLE III. MEMBERSHIP AND DUES
Membership in this Chapter shall be open to all members of the Music Library Association and persons and institutions interested in the activities and objectives of this chapter.
Full membership is granted upon payment of annual dues to the Secretary/Treasurer.
The membership year shall be from September 1 to August 31.
Honorary membership will be extended to members who have received the Music Library Association Citation Award or have shown exceptional service at the chapter level.
Proposed change
ARTICLE III. MEMBERSHIP AND DUES
Membership in this Chapter shall be open to all members of the Music Library Association and persons and institutions interested in the activities and objectives of this chapter.
Full membership is granted upon payment of annual dues to the Secretary/Treasurer.
The membership year shall be from July 1-June 30.
Honorary membership will be extended to members who have received the Music Library Association Citation Award or have shown exceptional service at the chapter level.
Rationale
Changing the start and end dates for our membership year will allow us to align our fiscal year and dues cycle with MLA’s. This is a necessary step to integrate our dues collection with MLA’s, which will provide numerous benefits to the chapter:
Cleaner data: We will have a single set of membership records with self-service updating of contact information.
Eliminating tedious work for the secretary-treasurers by automating the soliciting and tracking of new memberships and renewals.
Possible improvement of our renewal percentages because members will have fewer tasks to remember. We know that some chapter memberships lapse merely due to forgetfulness.
Cost savings from not having to pay PayPal service fees. MLA has been covering the transaction costs and passing along the full dues payments to chapters.
Noteworthy News
Fundraising Challenge: MLA Paraprofessional/Public Librarian Travel Fund Endowment Campaign
submitted by Marci Cohen
As you may be aware, the Music Library Association is currently raising funds to endow a travel fund for paraprofessionals and public librarians, recognizing that these library workers often do not have adequate institutional support to attend MLA meetings. Following the lead of the California chapter, we are issuing a NEMLA chapter challenge grant. Our chapter will match donations totaling up to $500.
Full information about the endowment campaign is available here: https://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/general/custom.asp?page=ppl_fund
Most notably, the fund will be seeded with $25,000 from the anonymous donor and fundraising to reach the endowment of $50,000 will commence in the fiscal year 2018–2019.
Particularly because I started my library career in a public library, I intend to support this endowment campaign. To participate in the chapter challenge, either indicate your chapter when donating online on the MLA website or send a check payable to the Music Library Association to NEMLA secretary/treasurer Alan Karass, New England Conservatory, 290 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115 and include a note that it is for the paraprofessional/public librarian fundraising challenge.
Oral History Interview with Patricia “Tish” Brennan
By Marci Cohen
Patricia “Tish” Brennan is Assistant Professor/Head of Reference and Coordinator of Library Instruction at James P. Adams Library, Rhode Island College, where she is liaison to music and other departments. She earned an AB in Music from Brown University and an MSLS from Columbia University. After starting her library career at Boston Public Library, she left in 1983 for Rhode Island College, where she has worked since. She has been an MLA member since 1976. She joined NEMLA in 1977 and was a member for 20 years before taking a gap then returning in 2012.
This is an abridged transcript of our interview conducted on August 3, 2017 in Adams Library. It has been edited for clarify.
MC: Let’s start out with your background prior to becoming a music librarian, maybe your background in music and how you chose to come to librarianship?.
TB: My undergraduate degree is an AB in Music from Brown University. At the time that I attended Brown, they only had a single degree and the coursework, generally speaking, fell into either: you took history courses or you took theory courses. There was no such thing as a performing degree and there was no performing for credit. I was at a rather unusual period in Brown’s development for their music department. They had just decided several years earlier to start a PhD in musicology, and also to try and build an ethnomusicology program from scratch. So it was kind of fun; on a whim some alum gave us money to buy a gamelan, so, we got to fool around with some odd and unusual instruments. I was a freshman in 1971 and graduated in 1975, so early days for Ivy League institutions getting into music beyond the Western canon.
On the other hand, so I’m a senior and I’m wondering what I’m going to do with myself with an AB in Music, pretty much focused on history, and literally–serendipitously–I bumped into several other people who were also members of the chamber choir at Brown, and one of them said, “So, where are you going after graduation?” and I hemmed and hawed, and she said, “Why didn’t you apply to Columbia like I did?! You could be my roommate!” So I said, “What did you apply to Columbia in?” and she said, “I’m going to the Library school!” So, I checked into music librarianship, and decided since one of their faculty, their adjuncts, was Susan Sommer of the New York Public Library, that that might be a place I would like to go, so I did!
And I did take courses with Susan Sommer at NYPL, and it was an amazing experience. And I got to sing with Gregg Smith, who was associated with the Columbia chorus at the time. So, it was a great experience, and I learned all sorts of aspects of, not just music, but performing arts librarianship in general, which was really their sub-specialty.
MC: How’d you end up starting your career at Boston Public?
TB: I just wanted to come back to Providence, I loved being here, and I loved the smallness of the city. It was a place that had lots of resources and lots of arts but was also manageable as a place. And of course I had a certain amount of romantic interest in coming back to Providence, having met someone I really cared about who was getting his PhD at Brown. So, I did come back, and started applying for jobs in the New England area, and in very early 1976, I was actually offered the job at Boston Public, and then–it couldn’t have been hours after I was told, “We want you!” was when Boston went into a hiring freeze for over a year. they couldn’t bring me on to staff. For a year I did other things. And then finally in early 1977, the hiring freeze went away, and I came on at Boston Public as the most junior person. The department was headed up by Ruth Bleecker and she’d been head of the music department at BPL for some years by that time. The assistant head was Diane Ota, who eventually became head of the department. My more-senior reference colleague at that time was Natalie Palme who, for at least part of her professional career she was Natalie Palme-Breed when she was married, and then she went back to being Natalie Palme. And she moved from the Boston Public Library, while I was still there, to the Harvard Musical Association in Boston, and was an active NEMLA person. When Natalie left us, the BPL hired Jeannine Ayotte. And the BPL music department was an interesting place because we also hired two clerical assistants, but often they were people with huge musical experience, because they wanted to work in this amazing collection. And so, when I was there our senior clerical person was Donald Denniston, who’s a composer.
MC: He now works with me at BU.
TB: It was just wonderful interacting with all of these amazing musicians. We got “walk-in” traffic from people who–every time one of these happened, I have to admit, as a twenty-something person, I would be agog and my jaw would drop open and people would poke each other and go, “Look, that’s Ned Rorem! Look!” or, “Wow! That’s Gardner Read!” Actually, Gardner Read was a regular, he would be in probably once a month checking his own references because of course this is pre-online era, and he needed to thumb through things like the New York Times index,the Boston Globe index, the Music Index–we had a clipping file of performances, particularly New England, associated composers and performers–and he would check through there to see if there had been any mention of him or anything he was associated with.
The fact that we’re a hundred-year-old institution that has served an unbelievably vibrant musical community for all of these years in a more than cursory way–lots of public libraries have music collections, and they do serve a local musical community, but they’re not serving people associated with the BSO, and with the Boston Philharmonic, and with Boston Baroque, and with all the other ensembles that you can name. It’s just–for the size of the city, Boston has an unusually rich musical life in so many layers, both classical and all the genres of popular music that you can think of. So, we took that very seriously. But some of our administrators over the years–things would fluctuate; support would be there, then it would disappear, then it would be there again, then it would disappear.
I did most of the introductory teaching that that required. We didn’t exactly get a flood of those, but I found all of those just an amazing interaction, young people very enthusiastic about stuff, and I was still a young person at that point. I would have been in my late twenties by then, and by the time I left Boston Public Library–that was 1983, I was in my thirties– and there, my ability to open up a new world of discovery for them was really intriguing, and I loved it. So I decided, really, maybe I should go somewhere where I can do more teaching as part of my regular role, and still have my music librarianship role as well, and, Rhode Island College offered me that opportunity.
MC: You’ve really built a career here.
TB: I did. And, for the type of institution that we are, we have an unusually fine music department. Our students have gone on to graduate work at some of the most prestigious places in the US and also in Europe. Our performing degree is something that we’ve built up actually over the time that I’ve been here. In 1958 when they started construction on this campus, it became a liberal arts college with professional programs associated with it. And those professional programs were almost exclusively in education at the beginning. Music education has been part of that since the beginning.
MC: Looking over your CV I’m noticing some you’ve been heavily involved in instruction, both here at Rhode Island College and then with the larger library community. How did you take some of this to your colleagues through your involvement in NELIG or in the NEMLA Instruction Committee that you were involved in in the ’90s?
TB: I’m actually back on the Instruction Committee now, and–at the national level, I’m on the Instruction Sub-Committee, so that’s actually been a fun thing for me, getting back into it. There was a period here where we had two library directors, neither of which was particularly supportive of, “Oh, that’s some niche thing you do, that music thing.” “Oh, you’re head of reference; you should be focused on how to do better statistics at the desk.” The administrative work has never been my big love, and in fact I only took the head of reference job here at Rhode Island College because the then-director assured me–I said, “I don’t want to not be a line librarian; I would like to be”–if i can put it this way–“the first among equals, rather than ‘the administrative person who takes care of this,’” and he said, “That’s what I want, too.” Well, people retire, and people’s perspectives change, so, new folk said, “This is what we want people to do.” They didn’t support my going to NEMLA, they didn’t support my going to MLA, they didn’t support some of the other specialized associations that I had belonged to at various times in other areas of the arts. Just, they didn’t want me spending what they considered to be “their time” on those pursuits, and it limited what I could do. But, back in the ‘80s and early ’90s, bibliographic instruction was, was kind of a bugbear in the sense that music had so many specialized tools for so many different genres, that there was actually quite a debate, particularly between public librarians and academic librarians, about what it was important to tell people about. So, I was good friends with the people down at Providence Public–which had a separate music and art department at the time–and Susan Waddington was the head of music, and she was a frequent attendee at NEMLA, and there was some back and forth at several meetings, about, “Let’s tell people, let’s have a session about what it is that public librarians think are the most important things that we can make patrons aware of.” So we’re talking school children, we’re talking general musicians in the community who are amateurs, but we’re also talking possibly professional musicians who might be using our collections for different reasons, as opposed to, “Okay, we’re a college library, and we have more than one music curriculum–because we have more than one music degree–but still, we have this core of, ‘All music majors are going to be taking these courses and they should be aware of these things there, and they’re different because the mission is different.’” Is there overlap? Yeah, there was always some core tools, nobody ever left Grove off the list. But other things were very different. There was a huge reliance on PhonoLog! I didn’t know a single college library that owned PhonoLog, at least at the time, but PhonoLog was something we used every single day at BPL, and couldn’t have answered half the questions we got without it. The same thing for things like Music-In-Print; although we had some volumes of it here, eventually–again, BPL, we acquired every volume they ever published because we couldn’t be without it.
MC: You said that, when you were preparing you came across some artifacts; did you want to talk about some of the things that you came up with, maybe some particular MLA or NEMLA memories that were, particularly poignant, memorable, whatever?
TB: My daughter was born in 1992, and the 1992 Spring meeting of NEMLA was at Bates College. Now, ironically enough, my daughter is now a graduate of Bates College. But even more amazingly NEMLA related is, I had some minor jobs that I was supposed to do at that Bates meeting in Lewiston, and Paula Matthews, I believe, was in fact chair at the time–which was why we were going to Bates, and only a couple of days before the meeting was my due date for Sarah May, and she was born on May 20th and, the meeting was supposed to take place on something like the 23rd, so I communicated with Paula and I said, “I’m really, really sorry and somebody else will have to do these little things I was supposed to do, but I just really can’t make it, it’s just too close to the due date.” And, the guys chipped in and bought me a Bates teddy bear, and somebody brought it down to me when the meeting was over, And now it’s my daughter’s, and it sits very proudly on her desk, with his little Bates t-shirt on, and it reminds me of all the amazing people at NEMLA, and how we are a very–I don’t want to say tight-knit, that’s a cliche. We’re a very accepting, and we take pleasure in each other’s professional friendships. Sometimes they blossom into more and that’s absolutely great. But everybody is very much pleased to learn of each other’s work, to see how that meshes with the national scene. But also, we’ve been very supportive of each other’s careers but also each other’s user communities. Most people in NEMLA, in their local area, know all of their colleagues really well, know their collections well, have some idea of who their users are. There’s a lot of reciprocity that goes on, and that’s very satisfying, professionally. You don’t always get a teddy bear out of it, but lots of other things happen. We’ve always had a really wonderful relationship with the Providence Public Library all the time that they had a music department, and in the “darker days” when they took those things apart, they reorganized the library, music became less of a focus for specialists, we were still tapping into the local knowledge that staff there had, even though they no longer had their own discrete department in its own designated physical location in the building. It was important to us; lots of our student performers are looking for popular material that we simply don’t collect, so that reciprocal relationship is really important to us. It’s important for NEMLA members in other areas, that they know who their colleagues are, and they know whose expertise they can tap into for things they–legitimately, by their mission, that’s not what they do, but that doesn’t mean patrons don’t come in with that!
There are a few things that I actually dug up out of my own files, and, in fact, I am wearing one of my MLA artifacts, oddly enough. It’s a little hard to see because most of the damage is up here, under my shirt, but the first national MLA that I went back to after a hiatus of about ten years was the Atlanta meeting. And I love going to breakfast at MLA, and my goal has always been to find a local hangout. Diners are particularly appreciated, but anything that’s “Mom and Pop,” and the locals think is the place for breakfast. And my partner in crime in all of this, for many years, has been Steve Yusko, who is at LC now. But back when I was at Boston Public, he was at Boston Public, too, in the cataloguing department. And so, our MLA ritual has been, go to diners. So, I was tooling–I mean, charging out–down the sidewalk on my way to this diner, which we had found out about in Atlanta, and I must have been distracted. I like birds–so I was looking up instead of down, and one of those things where the sidewalk rises just a little bit, one square next to another, and I caught my sandal in that, and I went over like a ton of bricks. Fortunately most of me went over on a grass verge, but not all. And this pair of trousers–which I love, and have never given up–has concrete pits all across the top of it! And I just wouldn’t give it up. And every time I put it on, I think of that meeting in Atlanta and the fact that we were in this beautiful, modern, high-rise hotel, but I had been charging down the very broken-up sidewalk, looking for this little dive diner that we were going to go to breakfast at. So, my little MLA physical artifact, here.
But, I also pulled some of my files; I have the Fiftieth Anniversary Meeting of MLA that took place at Yale in 1981, and I remember being just bowled over by the people who came to that meeting–people that I had only heard of as names, kind of legendary names–Otto Kinkeldey, and people like that. They were names at the bottoms of articles and at the end of reference books, like this panoply of great stars, and these names suddenly showed up as live people at this meeting. And since I’d only had my library degree for five years–so it was all very (gasps) “Wow! Wow! Look at these people, these people have shown up at this meeting! I just can’t believe all of these names!” I even saved my badge from that meeting, which I had to write myself–they gave us the badge-holder and then you had to write in your own name.
In this file is actually my note that I wrote to Bonnie Jo Dopp; this is only a couple of years ago, when I started working through my files, and came across a whole bunch of MLA stuff and said, “Gee, I wonder if the archive wants this?” So, a lot of my more mundane material from when I was a member of the statistics committee–that would have been back in the ‘90s when I was doing other kinds of jobs and collecting documents, and I sent them all off, but I kept a few of them, particularly the New England-related things, like the Yale meeting for our anniversary. But I kept a number of other things that I thought were just fun stuff. Here’s a follow-up to our comment on how we used to teach: “The supplementary guidelines for bibliographic tools,” this was 1991, and this was a session at MLA in Indianapolis. (reading) “Reference ‘Lacunae’ and what you should know about them” from October 1986, and this would have been the meeting at Eugene, Oregon, which was the first time I ever had fruit-flavored beer, and thought it was the most amazing thing ever! This is the Milwaukee meeting of 1986, (reading) “Linking music and culture: what you need to know about world music materials” and I have a note to myself that says, “Check the catalogues to see who has this material,” and I’m thinking, “I wonder if anybody in Rhode Island actually has most of this.” Here are my notes from the Austin meeting of 1984, “There was a big discussion at the Orlando meeting among a bunch of us who had been at Austin about the absolutely bizarre place we stayed in, which was a motel with a cowboy theme, which had little–they weren’t quite cabins, but they were pretty close! And you could see the chuck wagon drawing up outside in the morning.” It was hysterical; they were somewhere between a quarter and a half mile away from the University of Texas campus, so, really funky. Now I understand that place is underneath a highway overpass and no longer a motel, but lots of things from Austin here, including notes for things (reading), “Unique, new accessions at the Bodleian.” “MLA workshop on small academic music libraries,” which, quite frankly, when I came to Rhode Island College in 1983, we were a relatively small music collection, the collections are a lot bigger now and our music department and its offerings are a lot bigger now. But this was a presentation that Laura Dankner gave at that pre-conference in 1983, and the presentation was called A Day in the Life, so it was a description of how the generalist in a small music library has to get along and wear a lot of hats, some of which are musically-related hats and some of which have nothing to do with music at all. The other two presenters at this were Linda Solow–who was not yet Linda Solow-Blotner–and Ruth Watanabe. So, lots of, again, amazing names from MLA’s middle years, if I can put it that way. And, here’s the actual stuff from the Fiftieth Anniversary Meeting, which had a beautiful commemorative brochure: gorgeous gold lettering, MLA, and beautiful listing of 1931-1981 in script that I would describe as being the kind of script you’d expect to see for a book published during the German ‘30s period, kind of industrial-looking. And this being New Haven, Connecticut, we were at the fancy hotel downtown, the Sheraton Park Plaza, and Ruth Watanabe was president then, and Don Krummel was Vice President. Nice thank you letter for people who showed up and did various small jobs. Walter Gerboth was there from Brooklyn College, he gave two sessions according to this. There was a big session on sound recordings and dealing with those. I’m trying to find more of those famous names of people who came…oh! We got the, “hello” from the Yale librarian of the time–he was actually quite a character–Rutherford Rogers. A look back over things that have happened since 1931, he actually gave one of the presentations–Rutherford Rogers, that is–but so did Virgil Thomson, and Bill Lichtenwanger, and David Hall. So, again, big deal; Vivian Perlis was there, Lehman Engel was there. All of the famous MLA people that you can think of of that period, Dena Epstein and Mary Davidson, and other famous musical people: Ezra Laderman, Phyllis Curtin, Clara Steuerman. It was just–everywhere you turned was a wow; Otto Albrecht, –we heard a tape recording of Eva O’Meara that was brought by, I think, Carol Bradley. The “Who Signed Up” for the meeting, so I have the whole roster of everybody who came, and it is pages and pages and pages of people, many of whom had not come to a meeting in many years and had been retired for many years showed up at this, so it was really, it was quite a deal.
Not MLA-related; Boston concert related. That’s another BPL project: Boston area ensembles and who is in them and how to contact them. I actually have all of my notes from when we were doing that project. Now we just look them up on the web and they’ll all have a website. Of course, a lot of these ensembles are things that don’t exist anymore.
I have one of the original Chicken Singers scores, so for those of you who have not been in MLA for many, many years, I believe one of the founders of the Chicken Singers was, in fact, Susan Sommer. And we used to have a regular singing performance every year, as well as having the big band and instrumental performance–and the Chicken Song was always featured, kind of like a theme song. And it’s a work by Irving Jones, arranged for chorus by Bill Brooks, and it’s, “All birds look like chickens to me,” and it is a ridiculous song. It was a Vaudeville comedy song, originally, and it’s ridiculous, and it has choruses where everybody but the soloist is going, “cluck, cluck, chick, cluck, chick, chick, chick, cluck, caw.” It had many things added to it. So I’ve got manuscript additions to the original score, which somebody then interpolated various high descant parts and interlocking cluckings of various sorts. I also have some of the music from some of the other things that we did, we did a performance in 1988 of “The Minstrel Boy,” and a very odd performance of “Turkey in the Straw” for four-part chorus. So, it’s a tradition that I’m sad we no longer have, because there are lots of us, like me–my instrumental skills are good enough to pass theory, no one would want to listen to them as an audience. But, I’m a good singer, we’ve got lots of really good singers. Now we occasionally get regaled by people as soloists, “band singers,” if I can put it that way. But, we don’t think as an ensemble anymore, and I think we should–my personal opinion, we should revive that. We’ve got lots of talent to draw on.
I have the original “Wellesley College Folder Welcomes NEMLA for their Twenty-Fifth Anniversary,” and they did a bang-up job. Jean Morrow was chair then, and Dorothy Bogner was vice-chair, and for a number of years, Dorothy Bogner was chair of the Publications Committee, and when she was chair I was editor of the Membership Directory. This was back in the, “we-did-it-in-paper era,” long before we converted it to an online file. Somewhere, sadly, in the boxes that are still not unpacked in my brand new office, is the last directory we published–which, I believe, was 1989–before it became a computer-based file.
I have the chapter history, which I assume our archive has a copy of as well, 1962 to 1988, so the Twenty-Fifth Year Chapter history book. And Jean, Dorothy, Bob Louden [Loud], Sylvia St. Amand–she was at Springfield Public Library–did the chapter history, so we’ve got things to draw on from that era that are actually written down as an official print publication. Lots of cool stuff happened at this meeting, I have my Twenty-Fifth Anniversary badge with the gorgeous silver “Twenty-Five” on it. Again, these are things that, when the day comes when I become–cross your fingers–Emerita at Rhode Island College, a thing much to be wished, because it will give me ongoing access to our online resources, for one thing. These things will go to our NEMLA archive for safe-keeping for the duration.
That Spring meeting at UNH 1989 had a theme of looking at traditional music–so various sorts, which was pretty neat–including, “U.S. Parlor Music,” was one of the sessions. And we are blessed with having a tradition of almost always having a performance as the end of our meeting days. It is important (laughs)–sometimes, in general librarianship, it’s a bad thing that people now seem to want to–or feel free to, or think it’s even maybe a good idea to–bash the idea that we are about books as one of the things we do (laughing), that somehow that, “book” is a dirty word, and we want to back away from that or get away from that in some sense. And I think music librarians have never bought into that psyche, that music is very much what we’re about, and to say that we–that performance is as important to us as any of the technical esoterica that we have to deal with in order to do our jobs is one of the delightful parts of being part of this part of librarianship.
And, one of my favorite backfiles here was, our Fall ‘98 meeting was at Brown, and that was a lot of fun, having it be a locally-produced meeting. And that was late enough that Brown had its new music facility available to us. When I was an undergraduate, the music department was in a tiny, little, old house, and we had no recital space that wasn’t something else–a chapel, a lecture hall, a something else. The music collection was part of the humanities and social science library–the Rockefeller Library–and the sound recordings collection there was in a hot closet that had once been a reading room for one–the kind of things grad students can sign up for–with no ventilation. Most of the sound recordings were in the little house where the music department lived, but even there, there was no serious climate control of any kind. They were all LPs, things would warp and degrade rather quickly, and their ability to purchase the Orwig Mansion and expand it with recital space and a true music library with climate control and better-fit classrooms and all of that kind of stuff, it was huge. So, it was fun having the meeting at the new music facilities at Brown–or at least they were new-ish at the time, not quite spanking new, but pretty close. And it was a great meeting, lots of stuff about, both the technical side–we talked a lot about vendors and networks and library resources and how to get a hold of them. Nelinet–Robert [Cunningham] gave a part of the morning was, in fact, getting a handle on music authority control in our various national networks. We were all talking about our new online systems, WLN as an example of getting a handle on music cross-referencing, so there was at least one institution in the local area–and it wasn’t Brown, actually, that had WLN. So, lots of interesting talk about forming of consortia in various places. We didn’t yet have a big consortium in Rhode Island–which we do now, it’s called HELIN–but, people were beginning to coalesce in those ways, because technology was making that more and more possible as a way to cooperate across libraries in an area. So, (sighs) memories, memories. Great stuff, it was a wonderful day; we toured the whole back and the front of the new Orwig Library and classroom spaces. We talked about American Editions–the Music of the United States of America had just–just–started, and they outlined their editorial plan for us. Okay, dealing with your new music online catalog, and all the bugbears and stuff–I remember that one, they almost couldn’t shut down the Q&A after that, so many people wanted to tell about their war story, and I think that’s an important function of what we do at the NEMLA level, that we can take the time to say what our local experience is as part of that conversation. That it is–just because you are using a system that’s not widely used by others here doesn’t mean that that experience can’t add to the collective knowledge about how things work and how people are doing what they’re doing in their music library.
This is newer, but it’s also Rhode Island’s, so these are my two Rhode Island-related files, local stuff. This is when we had MLA in Newport in 2008. Oh, what a weather mess! And a logistical mess; the hotel was under construction and it was out on Goat Island–which is in Newport Harbor–and it has a permanent causeway that goes out to it, but as you can imagine, this tiny little avenue was the only way the get to the hotel from any place that was actually in the city of Newport, and even in the best of times, it’s a traffic jam–that all local folk know about–but with everything under construction it was that much more of a hell-hole traffic jam at the time. So, February of 2008 we actually had a blizzard hit during the conference–that was an (clears throat) interesting occurrence. Rhode Islanders are used to snow, but Newport is not particularly used to snow, because being right in the middle of the bay, snow usually melts pretty quickly for them. So when they get snow, they expect the snow to just disappear, except it didn’t. (Laughs) So then people had to negotiate all of that. And, lots of fun stuff happened with that: people got to eat a lot of seafood, which is good; Newport is well-known for its seafood cuisine. I’m trying to see if there is anything particularly session-unique about this. I commuted to this! I wasn’t on Goat Island, I was in Providence and I commuted down for all the daily meetings, and that was an interesting thing once the snow hit. For those of you not intimate with Rhode Island geography, Newport is about a forty-five minute drive on a good day, with the sun shining, so when snow flies it’s a commute that’s more like–add something to about an hour and fifteen minutes for, not just the general weather, but how everybody else will handle the general weather badly on the road. So, I actually missed the start of several sessions by just not being able to arrive on time. And I did bring down a couple of Providence folk at various times, I’m pretty sure I gave a ride to Margaret Chevian from Providence Public Library to a couple of these sessions, so that was a fun thing to do. She was their sound recording specialist at the time. Okay, so that’s the trip down memory lane through the files here, that was the best stuff.
MC: That was wonderful. Any closing thoughts? You’ve been extremely thorough.
TB: Just that I hope people take advantage of this. I will tell you, honestly, I had some worries; I, am a good teacher, so I like to talk, and I know how to talk off the cuff. But it’s still funny talking about yourself, and also talking about your friends, to a certain extent. But it’s a real opportunity for the chapter to not only know about the careers of people who are still with us–like me–but also the people who are no longer with us, who were my mentors, who were important to the chapter and we can’t hear from them anymore, and they were key to many of the things that the chapter did, and to the gestalt that we’ve been able to keep up all of these years, because that was their way of organizing their professional association. And I think we’ve kept that way, which was very much to involve ourselves in each other’s professional developments and professional activities, and we should be faithful to that, in the future, and this will help us know who we were, in a different way than that printed history did from our Twenty-Fifth.
MC: That’s a wonderful way to close. Thank you very much.
NEMLA Officers
Chair:
Marci Cohen
Assistant Head
Music Library
Boston University
771 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02215
mcohen2 at bu.edu
(617) 353-3707
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Sarah Funke Donovan
Associate Archivist for Digital Assets
Boston Symphony Orchestra
301 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
sdonovan at bso.org
(617) 638-9452
Past Chair:
Jared Rex
Music Librarian
Fenwick Music Library
College of the Holy Cross
1 College Street
Worcester, MA 01610
jrex at holycross.edu
(508) 793-2295
Secretary-Treasurer:
Alan Karass
Director of Libraries
New England Conservatory
290 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115-5018
alan.karass at necmusic.edu
(617) 585-1247
Member-At-Large:
Patricia (Tish) Brennan
Associate Professor/Head of Reference
James P. Adams Library
Rhode Island College
600 Mt Pleasant Ave
Providence, RI 02908
pbrennan at ric.edu (401) 456-2810
Newsletter Editor:
Memory Apata
Music & Performing Arts Librarian
Dartmouth College
Paddock Music Library
Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755
memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu
(603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist:
Vacant Post
Website Editor:
Lisa Wollenberg
Public Services Librarian
Allen Library
University of Hartford
200 Bloomfield Ave
West Hartford, CT 06117
lwollenbe at hartford.edu
Office: (860) 768-4840
I am still tingling looking back at the success of our joint meeting with NYSO and SQACBM in Montreal in November. As Alan Karass mentioned, the idea had first been floated decades ago, so it was great to see it come to fruition. I appreciate the efforts of every NEMLA member who helped make it a success, including those who just hauled themselves to Montreal to mingle with and learn from our colleagues from outside New England.
Chapter activities are quiet at the moment, but we have a lot going on in the coming months. I’m happy to announce that my own institution, Boston University, will be hosting the spring meeting on Friday, May 31. We wanted a central location after the acknowledged inconvenience and expense of Montreal.
Would you like to help your fellow chapter members with their conference proposals? At the chapter board meeting last summer, we decided to launch a proposal feedback service. The idea is to make the conference proposal process less intimidating and more successful for less-experienced chapter members. Before submitting a proposal for either NEMLA or MLA, a member could solicit feedback from other chapter members who are not part of the program committee. Please contact me (mcohen2@bu.edu) if you are interested in providing feedback, especially if you ever served on a program committee or have frequently submitted successful proposals and can offer opinions on what makes a proposal stand out. We’ll have more details on the service in our next issue in time for both the NEMLA and MLA meeting proposal deadlines.
Another initiative in the works is migrating our dues collection from the chapter level to integrating it with MLA’s. Again, more details will appear in the next issue, but I thought members would appreciate understanding the process and rationale well in advance. The biggest challenge is that this will require members to approve a by-laws change to align our fiscal year with MLA’s. We’ll have a proposed by-law change in the next issue so that we can vote on it at the spring meeting. More importantly, there are numerous benefits to doing making this switch.
Cleaner data, which our catalogers in particular will appreciate. We’ll have a single set of membership records with self-service updating of contact information.
Saving wear-and-tear on our secretary-treasurers by automating a lot of tedious work of soliciting and tracking new memberships and renewals. Alan Karass has been a treasure of a secretary-treasurer (I highly recommend working with him whenever you can!) but there are better uses for the time of whoever holds this position.
Possible improvement of our renewal percentages because members will have fewer tasks to remember. We know that some chapter memberships lapse merely due to forgetfulness.
Cost savings from not having to pay PayPal service fees. MLA has been covering the transaction costs and passing along the full dues payments to chapters.
To clarify a few questions people may have, we will still handle registration for our chapter meetings, and we will not migrate our chapter website to the platform that MLA uses. Several other chapters have already made the switch and are happy with the results. Please let me know if you have any concerns, and I look forward to the by-law proposal change.
Respectfully submitted,
Marci Cohen, Chair, New England Music Library Association
Assistant Head, Music Library, Boston University
Chapter Dinner at St. Louis Meeting
Are you attending the MLA annual meeting in St. Louis? In lieu of a chapter meeting, we’ll have a chapter dinner on Thursday, Feb. 21 at Rosalita’s Cantina, 1235 Washington Ave. The Tex-Mex restaurant has vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options and can accommodate our need for separate checks. It is about a 15-minute walk from the host hotel. Either meet us in the Union Station Hotel lobby at 6:50 to walk there with the group or meet us at the restaurant for a 7:15 reservation. RSVP by Thursday, Feb. 14 to Marci Cohen, mcohen2@bu.edu.
Secretary Treasurer’s Report
Submitted by Alan Karass, NEMLA Secretary-Treasurer
There were 29 registered attendees for the fall meeting, including two students.
Fall Meeting Income
27 regular registrations: $1,620.00
2 student registrations: $40.00
MLA grant: $750
Total: $2,410.00
Fall Meeting Expenses
PayPal fees: $57.14
SQACBM deposit: $350.00
Grants awarded: $400.00
Badges & holders: $52.89.00
SQACBM balance due: $1,660..00
Total: $2,520.03 (net loss $110.03)
Fall 2018 Meeting Minutes
NYSO/NEMLA/SQACBM Joint Meeting in Montreal
Adapted from a report originally published in the 200th MLA Newsletter by Marci Cohen, Boston University, NEMLA Chapter Chair
On November 8 and 9, the New York State-Ontario (NYSO) and New England (NEMLA) chapters of the Music Library Association and the Quebec Chapter (SQACBM) of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (CAML) held a joint meeting in Montreal at McGill University’s New Residence Hall. The event attracted approximately 100 attendees from across the U.S. and Canada, including members of the MLA board who held their own meeting in conjunction with the event.
Laura Stokes of Brown University with daughter Julia and Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy of Yale in Montreal
The program committee attracted so many worthwhile proposals that organizers expanded the event to fill both days, with 17 presentations, two posters, and concluding with a tour of the Canadian Music Centre. SQACBM and NYSO also held chapter meetings. Designed as a bilingual event, most presentations were in English. Those who spoke French accompanied their talks with slides in English.
Memory Apata and Tyné Freeman of Dartmouth College present their poster, “Making Noise: Sounds of the Civil Rights Movement in the Dartmouth College Libraries.”
The presentations covered a wide range of topics and issues relevant to music libraries. For example, Julie E. Cumming, McGill University, and Jada Watson, University of Ottawa, spoke about digital scholarship projects involving finding trends across large bodies of musical works, while Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy, Yale University, conducted traditional research on a single song, “The Long, Long Trail,” tying together her own institution, McGill, University of Toronto, and the timely 100th anniversary of the WWI armistice. Lisa Philpott, University of Western Ontario, addressed the challenges of self-published PDF scores, while Andrea Cawelti, Harvard University, advocated for the myriad wonders of sheet music. Proving that everything old is new again, Joseph Darby, Keene State College, discussed subscription-based music publishing in 18th-century Britain, a process with obvious parallels to today’s crowdfunding. Jonathan Manton, Yale University, and Lenora Schneller, Cornell University, described methods for better meeting user needs, the former with methods for developing an online A/V access system and the latter with library renovations based on open-ended survey responses. Ronald Broude of music reprint publisher Broude Brothers Limited gave a first-hand account of the history of music reprinting, including a juicy tidbit about sabotaging a competitor’s ethically questionable actions.
Andrea Cawelti of Harvard and Richard Cunningham of the Boston Public Library enjoy a break in the presentation hall.
A particular highlight was “Current Issues and Future Directions in Music Librarianship,” notable for its esteemed panel: MLA President Mark C. McKnight, MLA Vice President/President-Elect Susannah Cleveland, IAML Vice President Joseph Hafner, and CAML President Carolyn Doi. CAML President-Elect Houman Behzadi facilitated the discussion. The panelists addressed a variety of challenges and opportunities facing the profession, including the shift away from subject specialists, diversity and inclusion issues such as better representing First Nations in Canadian collections, and general leadership advice.
Mark McKnight, Susannah Cleveland, Joseph Hafner, and Carolyn Doi serve on a panel to discuss pressing issues in the profession.
The first day of the event ended with a reception at McGill University’s Marvin Duchow Music Library marking the opening of a new exhibit, Women, Work, and Song in Nineteenth-Century France. In a city renowned for its food, the delicious spread was no surprise. What was remarkable was the presentation, no mere list of thank yous for the exhibit. Curator Kimberly White provided both an overview of the themes covered by different parts of the exhibit and an introduction for each representative song performed by vocalist Catherine Harrison-Boisvert. Harrison-Boisvert’s evocative delivery coupled with White’s English-language descriptions made the performance entertaining and informative for both Francophones and Anglophones.
Houman Bezhadi of the University of Toronto welcomes attendees to a reception at the McGill Music Library.
Vocalist Catherine Harrison-Boisvert performs french songs composed by women for venues from the parlor to the cabaret.
A working group with representatives from each chapter planned the event: Houman Behzadi, NYSO & SQACBM; Cathy Martin, SQACBM; Lenora Schneller, NYSO; Jared Rex, NEMLA; Marci Cohen, NEMLA. The program committee consisted of the program chairs from each chapter: Sarah Funke Donovan, NEMLA; Jim Farrington, NYSO; Christiane Melançon, SQACBM. Board members and other representatives from the three chapters assisted with other arrangements including catering and registration.
Spring Meeting Preview
NEMLA’s Spring Meeting will be held on May 31, 2019, at Boston University (BU). The Music Department at BU was founded in 1872 and is home to more than 500 undergraduate and graduate music students, including in-person and online degree programs. In addition, the Music Department boasts a faculty including twenty five members of the Boston Symphony orchestra. The music library at BU serves the academic mission of the department by providing access to a collection with a wide scope, including performing arts, jazz, and spoken-word materials.
Additional details will be provided via the NEMLA list-serv in the upcoming months. Please email SarahFunkeDonovan with questions regarding the Spring Meeting (sdonovan@bso.org).
The program committee will be issuing a call for proposals shortly from all members of the NEMLA community. We encourage those new to the process to submit work regardless of experience in order to benefit from the feedback of seasoned professionals in the field.
Seeking Nominations
NEMLA members should expect an email from the Nominating Committee detailing vacancies in the upcoming year on the NEMLA board, as well as on various committees. We invite you to consider serving our organization in 2019! Questions regarding nominations should be directed to Jared Rex (jrex@holycross.edu).
NEMLA Officers
Chair:
Marci Cohen
Assistant Head
Music Library
Boston University
771 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02215
mcohen2 at bu.edu
(617) 353-3707
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Sarah Funke Donovan
Associate Archivist for Digital Assets
Boston Symphony Orchestra
301 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
sdonovan at bso.org
(617) 638-9452
Past Chair:
Jared Rex
Music Librarian
Fenwick Music Library
College of the Holy Cross
1 College Street
Worcester, MA 01610
jrex at holycross.edu
(508) 793-2295
Secretary-Treasurer:
Alan Karass
Director of Libraries
New England Conservatory
290 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115-5018
alan.karass at necmusic.edu
(617) 585-1247
Member-At-Large:
Patricia (Tish) Brennan
Associate Professor/Head of Reference
James P. Adams Library
Rhode Island College
600 Mt Pleasant Ave
Providence, RI 02908
pbrennan at ric.edu (401) 456-2810
Newsletter Editor:
Memory Apata
Music & Performing Arts Librarian
Dartmouth College
Paddock Music Library
Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755
memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu
(603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist:
Sofia Becerra-Licha
Archivist
Stan Getz Library
Berklee College of Music
1140 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02215
sbecerralicha at berklee.edu
Office: (617)747-8001
Website Editor:
Lisa Wollenberg
Public Services Librarian
Allen Library
University of Hartford
200 Bloomfield Ave
West Hartford, CT 06117
lwollenbe at hartford.edu
Office: (860) 768-4840
As with our last issue, the big news is still our joint meeting in Montreal with the New York State/Ontario chapter of MLA and the Quebec chapter (SQACBM) of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (CAML). Registration is now open, and I hope to see many of you there on November 8 and 9 as we connect with our colleagues from further afield. Thank you to Tish Brennan for heading up the effort on travel grants, which makes this unique meeting more accessible to people early in their careers. More details on the winners appear later in this issue. Jared Rex, as past chair, has served with me on the working committee, focusing on coordinating the chapter webmasters to post the registration announcement. Thank you to Sarah Funke Donovan as the NEMLA representative to the program committee, particularly for the committee’s effective publicity and outreach. Proposals were slow to arrive, but the committee allayed our fears after the deadline when they wanted to expand the schedule to accommodate the deluge of worthy proposals.
I am quite pleased to see several NEMLA members on the Montreal program. I appreciate their willingness to both make the trip and to share their expertise to expand their their colleagues’ professional knowledge. This brings me to my next point, our efforts to get our members more involved in the chapter and MLA. I first took on leadership roles in high school organizations where turnover is constant, so I have a longstanding mindset of encouraging active membership. One of my favorite catchphrases from that era is, “The more you put into it, the more you get out of it.” The board has been working hard to make potential and new members feel welcome, but getting involved is a step further for new and veteran members. Activities such as serving on committees and in appointed and elected office and presenting at conferences benefit the chapter, MLA, and the profession as a whole. But you also benefit. There’s the obvious side of padding your resume, but presenting also enables you to build your professional network, especially outside your own workplace, developing new skills that you might not exercise in your day-to-day duties, and deepening your own understanding of your work when you present it to your peers.
I’ve learned from working on nominating committees and in other leadership roles that people are often reluctant to volunteer. On the flip side, I’ve definitely benefited from the encouragement of others to chair a committee, present at a meeting, take on a special role or run for office. So my advice to you is to say yes if asked to do more. But also be willing to stick your hand in the air, maybe embracing your inner Lisa Simpson, and volunteer before being asked when opportunities arise. Jared Rex will report on committee openings in this issue, so here’s your first chance.
Finally, a note on membership renewals, which are due soon. You may notice that we no longer offer a 3-year membership option. We have made this change to simplify accounting as we pursue shifting from collecting our own dues to managing membership activities through the MLA website. We’ll have much more on this in upcoming newsletters, but I want to answer three questions up front that are likely to arise. First, we will continue to offer standalone membership to NEMLA without joining MLA. Second, although the 3-year membership option has been our practice for many years, it is not a formal policy that requires a membership vote on a by-laws change. Third, our finances are stable enough that the board did not even suggest increasing dues; dues have remained the same for at least 6 years, so the prepaid option has not been useful as a hedge against inflation.
Marci Cohen, Chair, New England Music Library Association
Assistant Head, Music Library, Boston University
Fall 2018 Meeting Registration/Information
Registration
The exterior of McGill’s New Music Building, which houses the Marvin Duchow Music Library. Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:McGill_faculty_Music_department.JPG
Registration is now open for the joint meeting of the New York State-Ontario (NYS/O) and New England (NEMLA) Chapters of the Music Library Association and the Québec Chapter of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (SQACBM). The meeting will be held at McGill University’s New Residence Hall in Montreal, Quebec on Thursday, November 8 and Friday November 9, 2018. We are pleased to announce that the MLA Board of Directors will also be joining us for this international conference.
Regular registration: $75 CAN / $60 USD
Student registration: $25 CAN / $20 USD.
Registration deadline: Friday, Nov. 2
To register:
Attendees who are not members of any of these chapters may use whichever chapter registration they prefer. SQACBM registration is in Canadian dollars; NEMLA and NYSO registrations are in US dollars.
Please be advised that attendees from the U.S. will need a valid passport to enter Canada.
Hotel
We have a block of rooms reserved at the Hilton Garden Inn Montreal Centre-Ville, 380 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0B1, Canada. Make your reservations by September 26 for the discounted rate of $179 CAD. The rate is available for Nov. 7-11, but you may choose a shorter stay when making reservations.
Link for reservation: http://group.hiltongardeninn.com/MusicLibraryAssociation
Click here to indicate which nights you would like to share accommodations.
Traveling by Car or Looking for a Ride?
Click here to find a ride or offer a ride to Montreal for the NEMLA/NYSO/SQACBM Joint Meeting!
Preliminary Program
Except as noted, all events will be held at the New Residence Hall located at 3625 ave du Parc, Montreal, Quebec, H2X 3P8, Tel: (514) 398-3471.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8
9:00 – 10:00
Breakfast and Networking
10:00 – 10:30
Welcome and Thanks
10:30 – 11:00
Morning Session 1a – Putting the “I”s in RIdIM: International Involvement and Iconographic Images in the RIdIM Database by Alan Green and Sean Ferguson
The RIdIM Database of Performing Arts in Visual Culture is poised to be a vital part of the global arts and humanities landscape. It is free to access at db.ridim.org, offering an ever-expanding variety of visual culture items (more than 3,000, and growing). Increasingly, image files from many museums and other institutions can be uploaded and viewed directly in the database, following emerging standards for public domain usage. The database supports text in any language and script, provides established lists of names and places, and includes an extensive international vocabulary of musical instruments, based on the multilingual thesaurus developed by the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO). This presentation highlights the growing and planned international coverage of the database, thanks to the recent cataloguing efforts of numerous individual participants and shared data from partner projects. We invite new database content by welcoming individuals to catalogue works of personal interest and familiarity. RIdIM aims to include art works of all types, time periods and places, in the database, so that the possibilities for participation are vast. In addition to the database style guide, and support from the RIdIM Editorial Center staff, new tutorial materials are available in text and video formats to assist cataloguers in creating database entries.
11:00 – 11:30
Morning Session 1b – How a MediaWiki Archive Can Support Creative Research in Music by Catherine Henderson
The Ecstasies of Influence project at Matralab, a research center at Concordia University, explores whether creative strategies from various artistic domains can be transferred into music creation. For example, can music be composed the way a poet arranges words, or a visual artist conceives an installation? Teams of artist-researchers in Montreal, Berlin, and Pune (India) are engaging with artists from various disciplines to learn their creative processes and aesthetic strategies, to try and apply them to musical composition.
To document the process, video recordings are made of the discussions, workshops, rehearsals, and performances. However, how do we preserve these multimedia research materials for reuse throughout the project and in the future?
This paper discusses the process of determining the archival needs of the project and users, and why MediaWiki was selected as the best platform for a searchable and browsable database. It also discusses how a taxonomy was established for an in-progress research project, and the challenges of managing information for an interdisciplinary and multi-national music research project.
11:30 – 12:00
Morning Session 1c – Developing user-centered tools and services for supporting digital musicology/Musicologie numérique : développement d’outils et de services centrés sur l’utilisateur by Audrey Laplante and Jean-Sébastien Sauvé (bilingual)
In this presentation, we will discuss the role academic libraries can play in supporting digital musicology by providing examples of successful library initiatives to support digital humanities. We will then advocate for libraries who wish to play a greater role in supporting digital musicology scholarship to use scholarly primitives as a conceptual framework for gaining an in-depth understanding of the research practices of music scholars and hence develop facilities and services that will meet their needs. Coined by Unsworth in 2000, the term ‘scholarly primitives’ refers to the “basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.” By looking at these basic functions, it becomes easier to identify where libraries could help scholars overcome some of the barriers they face during the research process. The presentation will also include a review of the empirical literature on scholarly primitives of humanities scholars and on the scholarly behaviour of music and arts scholars. Based on this review, we will propose a list of scholarly primitives for musicologists grounded in empirical data.
12:00 – 1:30
Lunch on your own
1:30 – 2:00
Afternoon Session 1a – The well-tempered catalogue – the new RDA Toolkit and music resources by Damian Iseminger and Daniel Paradis
After nearly two years of re-design and re-structuring, the new version of the RDA Toolkit, the international standard used by many music libraries for cataloguing, was released on 13 June 2018. This new version, while looking completely different from past versions of the Toolkit, implemented concepts from the IFLA Library Reference Model, the consolidation of the FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAD conceptual models. This paper will detail the many changes to the RDA Toolkit, the possible impact of the changes on music cataloguing practices, and the role that translations of the Toolkit will play in helping diverse international communities implement the new RDA Toolkit.
2:00 – 2:30
Afternoon Session 1b – Can I listen to that online: Building AV Access Systems by Jonathan Manton
This session will discuss how music librarians can be actively involved in the process of scoping and designing digital audiovisual (AV) access systems or the AV components of larger digital access systems. It will outline how music librarians can be involved in the creation of requirements, often based on end user research, as well as the development prioritization process for these systems.
2:30 – 3:00
Afternoon Session 1c – Reprints: Views of a Publisher and User by Ronald Broude
Reprints (using the term broadly to cover any photolithographic reproduction of an existing publication or document) are an often misunderstood form of publication, scorned by some scholars and publishers and praised by many who use them. Now, when reprints are being replaced by various digital forms of publication, is an opportune moment to review the reprint phenomenon, both to offer a history and to propose much-needed definitions.
During the twentieth century, reprints made important contributions to both music and the study of music. During and after World War II, reprints were essential to professionals and amateurs seeking editions of standard repertoire. With the post-war expansion of colleges and universities, reprints provided access to important scholarship and to what were then standard editions. And reprints provided the Early Music community with the possibility of playing Renaissance and Baroque works in the forms in which they were originally published.
This paper offers the views of someone who has been both a publisher whose catalogue contained several hundred reprints and a scholar who made use of reprints in his own research.
3:00 – 3:30
Break and Networking
3:30 – 4:00
Afternoon Session 2a – Acquisition, access, and preservation of eScores: A new model for the library-music publisher collaborations by Brian McDonagh, Kyla Jemison, and Houman Behzadi
The music score publishing industry has maintained its traditional strongholds and print continues to dominate the market. The notable developments in electronic music score (eScore) publishing have for the most part targeted individual end users and their personal needs, leaving out libraries whose mandate is to collect, disseminate, and preserve for future generations. A few for-profit aggregators have produced packages of copyrighted eScores that are available to libraries for rent or purchase. These packages, however, have not been curated by music librarians and lack an awareness of library users’ needs, so their long-term value is questionable. Fear of widespread piracy, disconnect between music librarians and publishers, and the absence of sustainable acquisition models are the major factors delaying the emergence of eScore as a viable format in music library collections.
In this presentation, we will introduce an alternative model of acquisition that involves close collaborations between a publisher of Canadian art music, Plangere Editions (PE), and the University of Toronto Libraries. Our end goal is to acquire, provide access for authorized users, and preserve the eScore version of PE’s publications, for which we have purchased print equivalents in the past. Aside from the scope of the current project, the workflow that we are implementing to do this work is scalable and can be used for collaborations with other music publishers. Furthermore, the workflow has inherent potential for collaborative collection development among music libraries in Ontario and beyond. The project is the first of its kind in Canada.
4:00 – 4:430
Afternoon Session 2b – Libraries as Printers: Challenges of acquiring PDF music scores/parts from self-publishing composers by Lisa Philpott
While the electronic publishing of books and scores has become commonplace, e-publishing of scores by major music publishers has lagged-behind. Libraries and music publishers are unwilling to relinquish the print format, but the proliferation of music notation software has given rise to greater numbers of self-publishing composers, keen to sell and deliver their musical works in PDF.
The Music Library at the University of Western Ontario is an anomaly, in that it acquires, catalogues, and circulates music for the Faculty of Music’s choirs and large ensembles. A faculty member’s request to participate in a large-scale commission of a new work for wind ensemble in 2011 was approved; when the work was completed, the score and parts arrived as PDFs contained in zip-files: we suddenly found ourselves in the printing business.
Since 2011, we have continued to acquire music in PDF for our choirs andensembles, eventually developing a work-flow and suggestions for best practices for dealing with these materials.
4:30 – 5:00
Afternoon Session 2c – When a Consortium isn’t enough: Sheet music in a 21st century reading by Andrea Cawelti
The Sheet Music Consortium has been providing access to diverse collections since 2003. When it works, both bibliographic information and scans can be retrieved, but the searching access is not ideal for today’s users. Administered through UCLA, ingestion of new materials is not always easy for busy staff to manage. But their Digital Library Program has turned new attention to the Consortium, and change is in the wind. Join Andrea Cawelti for a presentation on new developments, some interpretive materials now available, and a look at what we can do with sheet music in 2018!
5:00 – 5:30
Travel to Marvin Duchow Music Library
5:30 – 7:00
Reception/Exhibition at the Marvin Duchow Music Library
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9
8:00 – 9:00
Breakfast and Networking
9:00 – 9:30
Morning Session 1a – Women in the 18th-Century British Music Marketplace: A View from the Subscription Lists by Joseph Darby
Although subscription music publications represent a small fraction of the overall music market in eighteenth-century Britain, scholars are increasingly using lists of subscribers to study the intersection of composers, audiences, and the music publishing industry. Detailed examination of subscription lists, for example, may be used to sharpen our knowledge of women’s involvement in the musical life of eighteenth-century Britain – as composers, consumers, performers, and publishers. The subscription method generally involved a buyer’s payment (or promise of payment) in advance of publication. In return, the subscriber wasoften rewarded with a discount on the retail price and her/his name inscribed in the work’s first edition on a list of subscribers. This paper provides results of a comprehensive study of subscription lists to over 450 music publications from eighteenth-century Britain. Data generated from these lists document the substantial influence and success of women in the music marketplace as the century progressed. Women accounted for a sizable share of subscribers to a wide range of music genres, and women composers often outpaced their male counterparts in subscription sales, especially with respect to songs (e.g., A.M. Hodges, E. Turner, F.E. Hodges) and keyboard music (e.g., M. Forrest, J.M. Guest, C.M. Barthélemon).
9:30 – 10:00
Morning Session 1b – The Long, Long Trail: An Iconic World War I Song and How It Came to Be by Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy
November 11, 2018 will mark the Centenary of the Armistice ending World War I. One of the iconic songs, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” by Zo Elliott and Stoddard King is still used to signify the music sung by soldiers in camp and in the trenches during the war. It turns up in a variety of films, television shows, and events commemorating the war. It was composed by two college students, and eventually published, yet were it not for the singing of some Canadian soldiers, it might not have become a cornerstone of the musical repertory of the military from the British Empire and the United States. There is another oddity concerning the song—it exists in two versions. The original, more familiar to British Tommies, has nearly been forgotten. And this has implications for the authenticity of the today’s performances. The presentation will draw on archival documentation from the Zo Elliott Papers at Yale University, contemporary accounts, and audio and video excerpts, both historical and contemporary. It is hoped that a Canadian audience may help to suggest resources for carrying this research forward.
10:00 – 10:30
Morning Session 1c – Discographic Metadata as a Research Resource for Studying Popular Music Genres: Introducing the SongData Project by Jada Watson
This paper introduces the SongData Project, which harnesses the potential of discographic metadata to create new opportunities for popular music research. Adopting methods for Big Data research in the humanities (Moretti 2005), and influenced by the collaborative “Big Data History of Music” project (which includes scholars and librarians at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Library), this project develops approaches for the collection and organization of discographic and biographic metadata in order to explore the connections between music and broader socio-cultural and institutional frameworks over time. In this way, the project connects relevant data to reveal the connections and patterns that influence historical processes.
This paper outlines the work underway to develop a comprehensive dataset of country music singles from Billboard’s Hot Country Songs classification list (1944-2017). The project dataset has been enhanced with biographic information about the broader network of artists involved in the creative process in order to facilitate queries about the relationships between songwriters, performers, and producers involved in the creation of country music. After discussing some of the technical challenges of data curation, it demonstrates how analysis and visualization of this type of data can transform musicological understandings of genre.
10:30 – 10:45
Coffee Break
10:45 – 12:00
Panel: Current issues and future directions in music librarianship by Mark C. McKnight, Susannah Cleveland, Carolyn Doi, and Joseph Hafner
In the age of the Internet, communication has advanced to unimaginable heights and modes of access to information have been revolutionized. While the traditional core mandates of libraries – provision and maintenance of access to curated information – remain relevant, the very meanings of library and library services are under constant revision and scrutiny. In this relatively unstable environment, music libraries have been navigating the change, at times along with the larger library community, and at others on their own given their somewhat unique nature. Music has posed, and continue to bring forward, its own set of challenges encompassing a myriad of issues, but also future opportunities that require the omnipresent involvement and strong leadership of music librarians. Therefore, the definition of music librarianship is also evolving to incorporate many more aspects that are increasingly part of the day-to-day life of a music librarian.
Considering all this change and the need for its successful navigation, an understanding of the larger directions of music librarianship seems highly valuable. Every music librarian, regardless of their field of expertise, would benefit from the “larger picture” or a global view of the current issues and future directions in music librarianship. The proposed panel, comprised of the leaders of the International and two national music library associations, aims to discuss a number of issues that music librarians encounter today and those in the horizon, for which they must prepare.
12:00 – 1:30
Catered Lunch
1:30 – 2:30
NYSO and SQACBM Business Meetings
2:30 – 3:00
Break and Networking
3:00 – 3:30
Afternoon Session 1a – The Magic Wand Question: Library Enhancements Sparked by Student Survey by Lenora Schneller
As part of Cornell University Library’s Fall 2017 survey about library services, spaces, and collections, undergraduate students were asked, “If you had a magic wand, how would you improve the library?” Inspired by responses from Music Library users, we identified several ways we could highlight resources and better help our patrons navigate the collection. This presentation will illustrate resulting improvements in signage, placement of stacks maps, promotion of special collections materials, streamed video resources, and on-demand tours, as well as ideas for programs to increase interaction with students. Where available, user statistics reflecting the changes will be included.
3:30 – 4:00
Afternoon Session 1b – Local music collecting in Canadian cultural heritage institutions: A summary of recent research by Carolyn Doi and Sean Luyk
Local music provides evidence of community norms and insight into broader historical and cultural contexts. Collections of local music represent delimited geographic regions through documentary artifacts such as sound recordings, printed ephemera, historical and archival materials. Increasingly, cultural heritage institutions are preserving and collecting local music, although these practices are under documented in scholarly and professional literatures.
This presentation describes a SSHRC-funded research project, Sounds of Home: Exploring Local Music Collections and Collecting in Canada that aims to: 1) identify where collections of local music are held, what music(s) they document, and what evidentiary value they possess; 2) understand the perceived value of collecting local music, and 3) record local music collection management practices currently used by public institutions to determine areas where practices may be improved.
We will present the summary of a survey, which was distributed to local music collectors in Canadian libraries in 2018. The survey results provide an overview of current trends, challenges, and strategies faced by local music collection managers in Canadian libraries. We will also give a project update, including plans for next steps which include interviews with collection managers as well as an overview of local music collection in Canadian cultural heritage institutions.
4:00 – 4:30
Afternoon Session 1c – Highlighted Collections: Bagaduce Music Lending Library (Maine), Downtown Collection (NYU) and the Louis Achille Delaquerrière Scrapbook (UWO)
An overview of the collections of the Bagaduce Music Lending Library (Maine), the Downtown Collection at New York University, and the Louis Delaquerrière Scrapbook at the University of Western Ontario.
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Fall 2018 Meeting Travel Grant:
Patrick Quinn has held the position of Instruction and Reserves Coordinator on the staff of the Music Library, Boston University, since Fall 2016, having graduated from Columbia State University’s Schwob School of Music with an MM in Oboe Performance the previous May. He is a 2014 summa cum laude graduate of UNH with a BA in Music Performance. Patrick noted in his grant application that he hopes attendance at the Montreal meeting will allow him to “further my understanding of the current state of music librarianship ….and [provide] a glimpse into music librarianship on a more international level…” Hearty congratulations on your award!
Adaliz Cruz has just begun her first year in the Master’s program in Library and Information Science at Simmons University. Originally from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, Adaliz earned a B.M. in Applied Classical Music (Flute) from the Inter American University of Puerto Rico. During an exchange semester at Queens College (CUNY) in 2015, she worked in their Benjamin Rosenthal Library. Adaliz attended the Spring NEMLA meeting at NEC as part of the First-Time Attendee program. This past summer, she was an intern at NEC’s Blumenthal Family Library.
First-Time Attendees
If this is your first NEMLA meeting, we welcome you to apply for our First-Time Attendees Program. For the Fall 2018 Meeting, this grant covers the registration fee for the meeting. Both current members and non-members are eligible to apply, so long as they have not attended a meeting before. The deadline to apply for funding through this program is Oct. 26, 2018. Please apply here. Also note that funding is regrettably not available for all first-time attendees, but we do strive to accommodate as many as we can on a first come, first served basis.
Seeking Nominations
Dear NEMLA members,
We currently have many vacancies on nearly every committee. Serving on a committee is a wonderful opportunity to easily get involved in our chapter. Committees are the lifeblood of NEMLA, and we are thankful for the talents and expertise committee members bring to our work in music librarianship in New England.
The following committees are seeking new members:
Nominating Committee (1 new member)
Program Committee (1 new member)
Education and Outreach Committee (2 new members)
Technical Services Committee (1 new member)
Publications Committee (1 chair; 1 new member)
Instruction Committee (1 chair; 2-3 new members)
If you have not recently served on a committee–or if you have served on one of our committees in the past–I encourage you to consider serving our organization on a new committee. Please contact me if you are interested in serving in this capacity, and I thank you in advance for your consideration.
Jared Rex, Past Chair, New England Music Library Association
NEMLA Officers
Chair:
Marci Cohen
Assistant Head
Music Library
Boston University
771 Commonwealth Ave.
Boston, MA 02215
mcohen2 at bu.edu
(617) 353-3707
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect: Sarah Funke Donovan
Associate Archivist for Digital Assets
Boston Symphony Orchestra
301 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
sdonovan at bso.org
(617) 638-9452
Past Chair:
Jared Rex
Music Librarian
Fenwick Music Library
College of the Holy Cross
1 College Street
Worcester, MA 01610
jrex at holycross.edu
(508) 793-2295
Secretary-Treasurer:
Alan Karass
Director of Libraries
New England Conservatory
290 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115-5018
alan.karass at necmusic.edu
(617) 585-1247
Member-At-Large:
Patricia (Tish) Brennan
Associate Professor/Head of Reference
James P. Adams Library
Rhode Island College
600 Mt Pleasant Ave
Providence, RI 02908
pbrennan at ric.edu (401) 456-2810
Newsletter Editor:
Memory Apata
Music & Performing Arts Librarian
Dartmouth College
Paddock Music Library
Hopkins Center, HB 6245 Hanover, NH 03755
memory.r.apata at dartmouth.edu
(603) 646-3234
NEMLA Archivist:
Sofia Becerra-Licha
Archivist
Stan Getz Library
Berklee College of Music
1140 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02215
sbecerralicha at berklee.edu
Office: (617)747-8001
Website Editor:
Lisa Wollenberg
Public Services Librarian
Allen Library
University of Hartford
200 Bloomfield Ave
West Hartford, CT 06117
lwollenbe at hartford.edu
Office: (860) 768-4840
