Harvard University and virtually
Forum Room of Lamont Library
Friday, April 17, 2026.
Registration form (opens in a new tab)
This year’s registration fees are as follows:
Standard registration: $15
Student/Retiree registration: $10
First-time Attendee registration: FREE
Virtual (livestream) registration: $8
Please note that there is a firm registration deadline of April 9, 2026. This is to allow time for details to be finalized with Harvard’s catering and campus security teams.
SCHEDULE of the DAY
9:00 am – 9:30 am: Forum Room opens, coffee and pastries available
9:30 am – 9:45 am: Forum Room
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Anne Adams, Chair of NEMLA
Harvard Library leadership, hosting institution staff
9:45 am – 11:00 am: Forum Room
“Revisiting Piano Rolls”
Miruna Eynon, MLIS Candidate, Simmons University
and
“I’d Rather Stay Forever: On the Intersection of Punk Ethos and Radical Archival Practice in New England”
Lauren Posklensky, MLIS Candidate, Simmons University
11:00 am – 11:15 am: Break
11:15 am – 12:15 pm: Loeb Music Library
Loeb Music Library visit and gallery talk
Erin Conor, Peter Laurence, and Christina Linklater
12:15 pm – 1:30 pm: Lunch Break (on your own)
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Forum Room
Business meeting & By-laws discussion
2:30 pm – 2:45 pm: Break
2:45 pm – 3:40 pm: Hofer classroom, Houghton Library
Music special collections viewing
Houghton Library staff
3:45 pm – 5:00 pm: Forum Room
“Music, Women, and Leisure: Piano Sheet Music and the Amateur Musician in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt”
Roberta L. Dougherty, Yale University
and
“Working with Systems Colleagues to Improve Music Discovery”
Jared Cowing, Boston Library Consortium
5:00 pm: Adjourn
Presentation Descriptions & Presenter Bios
“Revisiting Piano Rolls”
Miruna Eynon, MLIS Candidate, Simmons University
In the summer of 2021, fresh out of High School and getting ready to study cello at my dream college – the New England Conservatory – I had the opportunity to experience a taste of the world of music cataloging. I was hired as an ‘extra help’ worker, aiding with a short project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Music and Performing Arts Library, making some of the piano rolls in the library’s collection discoverable. Under the thorough supervision of one of the staff catalogers, I was able to add over one hundred bibliographic records for piano rolls to the catalog, many of which were originals. It was a flood of new concepts, from metadata formatting and cataloging rules to cataloging applications, to the odd, obsolete format of the piano rolls themselves. Four years later, that experience would lead to my enrolling in a Master of Library Science at Simmons University, where I found myself returning to piano rolls once again. This presentation will discuss what I discovered about this unique format, its history, and how to describe it in a MARC environment.
Miruna Eynon holds a Bachelor of Music in Cello Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music and is a first-year graduate student at Simmons University in its School of Library and Information Science. She has been doing technical service work since 2021 in mostly music libraries, including the Music and Performing Arts Library of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Blumenthal Family Library of her alma mater. She is particularly interested in accessibility to musico-information regarding lesser-known works of music, and champions such works through her abilities as a performer.
“I’d Rather Stay Forever: On the Intersection of Punk Ethos and Radical Archival Practice in New England”
Lauren Posklensky, MLIS Candidate, Simmons University
This presentation will give an overview of a current graduate level independent study project to create a digital archive for zines created in punk and DIY communities of New England. This project was formulated after significant research into the intersection between community archives, radical archival practices, and DIY music scene culture. This research has taken multiple forms to explore avenues of how current archival practices can align with “Punk ethos”, including: personal experiences working in a grassroots local music archive BigHeavyWorld and the Vermont DIY music scene; evaluation of academic literature dedicated to community archival work; analysis of community-generated theory and discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of community archival work; and investigations into case studies of other repositories dedicated to DIY music.
The proposed presentation will synthesize several key points from the completed research, with particular focus on community perspectives and ideals that may contradict common archival practice or seem counterintuitive for archival professionals, and a brief survey of radical repositories and practices which aim to address some of these issues. From there, it will discuss how these ideals and unmet information needs have shaped the current digital archive being developed, the progression of the project, and the plans and milestones that lay ahead. Finally, the presentation will ask attendees to consider the crucial questions at the heart of this project about how individuals working in the field of music archives balance the roles of archivist and community member, and how music archives can evolve as centers of community.
Lauren Posklensky is a second year Masters student studying Library and Information Sciences at Simmons University. She previously received her BA in English Literature from the University of Vermont, and worked as a freelance promoter in the Vermont DIY punk community. Additionally, she spent several years as a lead volunteer at BigHeavyWorld, a Vermont non-profit dedicated to preserving and promoting local music. Lauren’s current research focuses on the intersections between punk ideology and radical community-led archival theory, and examining power dynamics in archival settings. Other professional interests include equitable cataloging, Medieval literature, and transformative fan works.
“Music, Women, and Leisure: Piano Sheet Music and the Amateur Musician in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt”
Roberta L. Dougherty, Yale University
Piano sheet music surviving from early twentieth-century Egypt provides a fascinating window on all aspects of the society within which it was produced. Annual foreign-trade statistics published by the Egyptian government show that in the 1920s, between one thousand and two thousand European-manufactured pianos were imported to Egypt every year. While some were destined for the public sphere of hotels, theaters, and nightclubs, many others became the centerpieces of bourgeois domestic parlors up and down the Nile Valley. At-home piano performance was connected to other forms of leisure and amateur entertainment, especially in the domestic sphere among Egyptian women. Safe in their living rooms, without having to leave home, the little daughters of upper-class and aspirational middle-class families received musical training in the form of piano lessons provided by genteel female piano instructors (some of whom were also composers), with the expectation that the lessons would result in equally genteel home-made entertainment intended not for public consumption but for the appreciation of an intimate circle of family and friends. Composers and educators such as Mathilde Abd al-Masih and her daughter Sophie, in their day little-known outside of Egypt and by now largely forgotten in their home country, participated in a complex network of activities in which they wrote and published piano music, arranged for its distribution through local music shops, and partnered with them to fulfill the social and cultural aspirations of bourgeois Egyptians through the sale of musical instruments, Victrolas and recordings, printed notated music, and musical instruction for their children. With lyrics (when present) in Arabic and nationalist themes such as patriotic anthems dedicated to Egyptian figures of state and marches commemorating other loci of national pride such as the discovery of the tomb of King Tut, the sheet music was clearly intended for a cosmopolitan Egyptian audience, not a colonial British or French one.
Roberta L. Dougherty is the Librarian for Middle East Studies at the Yale University Library. Her research and publishing covers topics including the history of printing in Arabic script, the history of the development of U.S. collections of manuscripts in Middle Eastern languages, American Orientalism in general, and the social construction of performance in the Egyptian musical cinema. She is three times past president of the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA), and is the recipient of MELA’s David H. Partington Award in recognition of her contributions to the field of Middle East librarianship. Her most recent publication, appearing in the edited volume Middle Eastern Dance: Histories, Theories, Performances (Palgrave Macmillan 2026), is her chapter entitled “Song in Najib Mahfuz’ Palace Walk: Recreating and Appreciating the Diegetic ‘Soundtrack’ of a Modern Egyptian Novel.”
“Working with Systems Colleagues to Improve Music Discovery”
Jared Cowing, Boston Library Consortium
The move of the last 10-20 years toward one-size-fits-all discovery systems has opened new possibilities for libraries and their users, but often at the expense of search features that are designed for specific formats and disciplines. One such example is the general move away from features utilizing music name-title headings that were more common in the prior generation of ILSs. While one promised benefit of linked data has been to revitalize discovery tools’ utilization of these headings and their associated authority data, that promise has yet to be fully realized. Discussing with systems colleagues the distinct needs of users searching for music materials can often be difficult, particularly when demonstrable examples of how “it should work” are now harder to come by.
This presentation will focus on strategies to work with systems librarians and developers to get the most out of your discovery interfaces for music discovery. Several common assumptions around the relevance of uniform titles in the modern search environment will be revisited. An experimental search tool will be shown as one way to help system developers visualize possible approaches to better supporting music discovery. Such a tool could help offer an accessible example of how systems could use name-title headings in a manner that both takes advantage of technology unavailable 10-20 years ago, and that could be viable in a time where the dominant paradigm has long been keyword searching. Feedback and discussion will be encouraged.
Jared Cowing is Assistant Director for Systems and Metadata Services at the Boston Library Consortium. In this role, he supports and provides leadership for the BLC’s Alma/Primo Network Zone program and additionally provides local systems support to individual BLC institutions. In several previous roles, he served for 10 years as a systems and discovery librarian, most recently at Smith College, and before that for 5 years as a music and A/V materials cataloger.