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Music Library Association
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No. 158 |
September–October 2009 |
| President’s Report Ruthann McTyre , MLA President |
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Greetings from Iowa City! Since the last newsletter the MLA Board has met twice. In early June we had our annual trip to Middleton, Wisconsin to meet at A-R Editions. The folks at A-R are very kind to open up their offices to us for a few days, giving us two meeting rooms and ensuring that we have access to both the ether and the kitchen (both very important for a successful meeting). At this business meeting, Pat Wall, A-R President, and I signed the Membership Services Contract between MLA and A-R Editions which will run through fiscal year 2011/2012. The services and support that the association receives from A-R go a long way in ensuring the future of MLA, and not just in the day-to-day business but in terms of how A-R continually looks for ways to improve the services they provide. I have the pleasure of talking with Jim Zychowicz at least once a week and believe me, he works very hard for all of us and does it with grace, a wonderful sense of humor, and a “what else can I do for you” attitude. Thank you, Jim! In June, the board approved the annual budget, celebrated Past President Phil Vandermeer’s birthday and approved various task forces, including one to design and implement a survey regarding members’ opinions on aspects of the annual conference, which will be administered following the San Diego meeting. Others include a task force to develop a list of greening initiatives that MLA should investigate for its conferences and charged with evaluating the effectiveness and structure of the board. Phil Vandermeer has volunteered to take the lead on developing checklists for committee chairs, roundtable coordinators and special officers, guiding them on “what to do when” in order to keep on track with things like annual reports or appointments of new members. These will be in place for the 2010/2011 fiscal year. Our fall board meeting was held 10–12 September at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. We were hosted by Fiscal Officer Paul Cary. Paul is an excellent host and a brave one as well. Along with his wife Sue and sons John and Peter, Paul opened up their home, fed us great homemade Mexican food and delivered a beautiful evening for having dinner outside on their deck. It was a perfect way to start the meeting. During the course of the meeting, we approved the convention budget and set registration fees for the San Diego meeting. Good news: registration fees are not going up this year! All editors and special officers were reappointed for the coming year and a new special officer position was approved. Very soon, we will be posting a job notice for the new Assistant Treasurer/Executive Secretary position. The Treasurer/Executive Secretary (T/Ex) and Assistant T/Ex positions will be designed to follow the same pattern as the President/Vice (or Past) President model. Board members unanimously agreed that the T/Ex job is so large that it really needs two people sharing the responsibilities. Watch for the job posting this fall. We plan on interviewing candidates in San Diego. Speaking of interviewing candidates, other opportunities to work for MLA are currently available. Searches for a Notes editor, a newsletter editor, an assistant web editor and an assistant convention manager will all be taking place over the next few months, leading up to San Diego interviews and (I hope!) announcements of new officers at the business meeting. I hope by now the school year has settled down for everyone and that you are looking forward to your fall chapter meetings. Be sure to keep an eye out for news about conference registration and plan on being an Early Bird registrant! Finally, thanks to everyone who has renewed their membership for the year. Jim Zychowicz tells me (quite proudly) that MLAers broke new records in getting dues in before the end of July, so THANK YOU! |
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We'll Be Heading to San Diego! The 79th Annual Meeting of the Music Library Association will take place in San Diego, California at Paradise Point Resort & Spa, Friday, March 19th through Thursday, March 25th. During wintery, bleak January just click on this link and explore the conference resort: http://www.paradisepoint.com/. Paradise Point is located on an island in San Diego’s Mission Bay. The Local Arrangements Committee is lining up several great tours and the Program Committee has put together an exciting and informative program. In your spare time you can frolic on the beach, play tennis, scuba dive, sail, golf, or schedule a visit to SpaTerre, a full-service luxury spa on site. For budgeting purposes, you may need the following: room rates at Paradise Point are $226.00 for a single or double and California accommodations tax is currently 12.6%. The charge for a triple or quad is $20.00 per additional occupant. Overnight parking is $20.00 a night. The next issue of the MLA Newsletter will include more information on the upcoming meeting. The annual meeting Web site is now available (http://www.mlascc.org/sandiego.html), and includes current information on registration, programs and, of course, San Diego. |
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Education Committee Issues Call For Poster Sessions Tammy Ravas, Poster Session Coordinator Deadline: 1 November 2009 The Education Committee of MLA is calling for applications for Poster Session presentations at the MLA annual meeting in San Diego, CA, March 18–25, 2010. Presentations will be considered that fit one of these broad categories:
Poster sessions place an expert about a given topic directly in front of conference attendees, many of whom will find great value in the ability to speak with the presenter. There is no limit to the range of subjects that can be presented as a poster; any topic can be arranged and displayed in a visually interesting manner. Parameters for Presentation: Posters selected for and displayed at the meeting will have a continued life in an online environment, where we will make every attempt to replicate the real poster experience. Guidelines for Submission: There are only twelve slots available, so those interested are encouraged to be original, thorough, and early in their applications. Authors of the selected poster sessions will receive detailed guidelines concerning effective preparation and presentation. An application is available on the last page of the newsletter. Direct questions to the coordinator at the address listed on the application. Thank you and good luck! |
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Developing Trends Jim Cassaro It has been only a month since I took on the responsibility of being the development officer for MLA. Talk about baptism by fire! Jumping in with both feet, as I am wont to do, the MLA Development Committee and I have been working on several initiatives to help foster giving to the association. First, let me thank everyone who has participated in our $5.00 campaign. This has been a very successful program of giving for us, and underscores that no donation is too small. Great rivers started with just a trickle! If you haven’t yet participated in this campaign, there is still time to do so. We will wrap up this campaign at our upcoming meeting in San Diego, so don’t delay. Donating is simple and easy using the online membership directory on the MLA homepage at http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/members/onlinedir.shtml. It takes just a few minutes to donate online, but your gift will last a lifetime by helping MLA to achieve its goals. Your generous donations help us to accomplish great things: support travel for our young professionals (Freeman Award), support research (Gerboth, Epstein, and Bradley awards), continue to recognize excellence in music publications (O’Meara, Duckles, and Hill awards), support access to scholarly research (RILM Endowment Fund), continue the excellence of our journal (Ochs Notes Fund), and ensure the future of the association (MLA Fund). Unrestricted donations are also welcome, as they can be used at the discretion of the MLA Board to help fund a number of other initiatives. Donations can be targeted as well to a socially-responsible fund if you so designate. There will be other opportunities for the MLA membership to help support the work of the association. I hope that like many of us, MLA has become a happy home for you as a music library professional. As such, I hope you will support this environment by being as generous as you can. There are not enough words to express how grateful we are for your continued support! Developing Trends is a new column. Look for it in future issues of the MLA Newsletter--Editor |
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Ronald Aldridge, Leonia, NJ |
Nicole M. Long, Normal, IL |
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The Music Library Association is seeking a new editor for the association’s journal, Notes. Responsibilities
Qualifications
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| In Memoriam | |
Carol June Bradley Carol June Bradley was born August 12, 1934 to George and Alice Bradley in the central Pennsylvania town of Huntingdon. Her family later relocated to Carlisle, PA. Bradley demonstrated her writing ability while still a high school student when she won first prize in the Lamberton Essay contest with her essay about the Irving Female College. She attended Lebanon Valley College to major in music education, graduating in 1956. However, she did not have a positive reaction to her student teaching experience and with advice from a school librarian in Carlisle, decided to attend library school at Western Reserve University. During her college years Bradley also studied violin, attending summer sessions at Chautauqua Institute where she studied with Hortense and Mischa Mischakoff. Bradley began her career as a music librarian in 1957 at the Free Library in Philadelphia where she was responsible for the Drinker Library of Choral Music. She wrote a history of the Edwin A. Fleisher Music Collection at the Free Library that served as her M.S. thesis in library science at Western Reserve University. Bradley left Philadelphia in 1959 to accept a new position at West Point Military Academy. Her tour of duty at the academy was brief but distinguished. She established a music library and also conducted a regular series of recorded concerts and pre-opera seminars. She left in 1960 to join the staff of the music library at nearby Vassar College. This began her long association with Jim Coover and provided her with the years of experience in technical services that shaped much of her later scholarly work. The George Sherman Dickinson Music Library at Vassar College used Dickinson’s own classification scheme for its music collection. Bradley became the leading authority on this classification system and later adopted it for use at the University at Buffalo. She wrote and published the chief guide to the system in 1968: The Dickinson Classification: A Cataloguing & Classification Manual for Music. Carol June Bradley served as chair of the Music Library Association’s Information and Organization Committee (1959-1967). During that period she produced two MLA publications: she compiled the information for the brochure, Education for Music Librarianship and edited the Manual of Music Librarianship (1966).
Carol June Bradley and Jim Coover In 1967 Jim Coover and Carol June Bradley were hired to create a music library at the University at Buffalo that would match the growing research demands and capability of new faculty and students. They began with some 18,000 scattered volumes of music and music literature, no office, no staff support, no telephone, no typewriter, and not even a book truck. When they retired in 1999 the Music Library was in a pleasant space largely built to their specifications within the same building as the Music Department. It held more than 159,000 fully processed volumes of scores, books, journals, and recordings, with backlogs of approximately 30,000 more items. They accomplished this while also establishing a successful program in Music Librarianship that produced dozens of well-qualified, successful music librarians. Although engaged in a very intense daily work load, Bradley completed a PhD in Library Science at Florida State University in 1978. She wrote The Genesis of American Music Librarianship: 1902-1942 as her dissertation. It was expanded to become American Music Librarianship: a Biographical and Historical Survey in 1990. During this period she was also able to continue her research in music librarianship, editing another text on the topic in 1973: Reader in Music Librarianship. It is interesting to note Bradley’s early interest and research into methods of automating library processes. She was active as the representative of the Music Library Association with the Library Automation, Research and Consulting Association (1969–1971) and the Association for Computing Machinery (1969–1971). Within the Music Library Association she served as chair of the Automation Committee during the same years. She presented a paper and exhibit at the 1973 meeting of the Music Library Association in Las Vegas titled Towards an Automated Record Catalog: A Description of the System Used at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Bradley continued to compile information about American music librarianship throughout her career and produced several more books and articles, including: Music Collections in American Libraries: A Chronology (1981), Classifying and Cataloguing Music in American Libraries: A Historical Overview (in Classification Quarterly, 2003), and American Music Librarianship: A Research and Information Guide (2005). Bradley was selected in 1977 as one of five librarians in the entire SUNY system awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship. The Music Library Association awarded Carol June Bradley the organization’s highest award, the MLA Citation, in 2001 to recognize her outstanding record of scholarship and service to the field of music librarianship as well as her years educating the “lumps of clay” that passed through the music librarianship program. Carol June Bradley also had the foresight to see the value of collecting documentation locally produced through the activities of music faculty and the many visiting musicians who performed in Buffalo. These collections are now used internationally by music researchers. A description of Carol June Bradley’s life would not be complete without mentioning her generosity to friends and family. She was devoted to her family, including the array of cats and dogs that were fortunate enough to call her house home. Her passion for horticulture was evident in the many plants that thrive in the sunlit Music Library and more so in her own gardens. She enjoyed travel and made several trips in the company of her sister Janice. Despite her sometimes stern demeanor, she loved to laugh and it was a sound that often rang through the library. Carol June Bradley died 27 July 2009 at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo of complications following a stroke. --Submitted by John Bewley, University of Buffalo
Anders Lönn Many of us in the United States first met Anders through his long-time partner, Lenore Coral, at the Music Library Association meetings, which he attended from time to time. Anders was the authority to whom many of us turned for an international perspective on cataloging and other issues in music librarianship. Anders had many friends in the American music library and musicology communities. Because his prominence in IAML goes back so far, many U.S. branch members were well acquainted with him and over the years have all witnessed firsthand his able leadership in IAML. It is not only Sweden’s loss, it is a loss for the world’s music community, the loss of a strong leader, a superb librarian, and a friend. --Submitted by Judy Tsou, University of Washington; President, IAML-US
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| Chapter Reports | |
Mountain-Plains Chapter Members of the Mountain–Plains Chapter (MPMLA) ventured to Missoula, Montana for their annual spring meeting, May 7–9, 2009. This was a first-time setting for the chapter and thanks go to Tammy Ravas and her colleagues at the University of Montana Libraries for the invitation and for being such wonderful hosts. Those arriving Thursday evening enjoyed a Tex-Mex dinner at El Cazador, a short stroll from the conference hotel. Friday morning members met in the Mansfield Library for registration. Following breakfast goodies, Bonnie Allen, Dean of the University Library, welcomed those in attendance. Carolyn Dow (Lincoln Public Libraries) started the conference with a presentation titled “Adventures with 2.0: The Music Library Blog.”She shared her experiences as a first-time blogger—see her posts at http://polleymusiclibraryscadenza.blogspot.com/. Next, Laurie Sampsel (University of Colorado, Boulder) gave an update on her dissertation research with “Samuel Babcock’s Middlesex Harmony, Second Edition: A Thomas and Andrews Composite?” Thomas Bell (Kansas State University) followed with his popular music perspective, “‘Fire Came from My Mouth is Pushing Me Around’: Why Kristin Hersh Matters More Than Ever.” Tammy Ravas (University of Montana) then gave attendees a tour of the library, highlighting music collections, and members were given a generous lunch break to explore campus, some even opting to hike up the trail of big “M” hill. Saturday morning, Suzanne Moulton-Gertig (University of Denver) presented “Music of Ancient Egypt: A Re-Evaluation in the 21st Century.” George Gibbs (University of Kansas) followed with “The “Miniature Piano Concerto” in British and American Films from the 1940s to the 1960s.” Steven Nordstrom (Brigham Young University) ended this session with “Research Resources for Scholarly Literature in Music: Comparing Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, Google Scholar, Ex Libris’ Primo, and Select Print Subject-Specific Bibliographies,” describing a study to determine student research strategies and to compare and contrast findings between available databases. A business lunch at the conference hotel boardroom concluded this year’s meeting.
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| Beyond MLA | |
Update on RAMH2 Resources of American Music History 2 will be an interactive, edited online directory (search engine) of collected resources (both material and electronic) generated by or about musical activity in what is today the United States from pre-colonial times to the present. It will incorporate resources from all genres, styles, and applications of music without restriction, wherever in the world they may be collected. Musicologists, librarians, archivists, and information specialists gathered at the University of Pittsburgh April 27–28 to plan for a digital, sustainable, and vastly expanded version of Resources of American Music History: A Directory of Source Materials from Colonial Times to World War II (RAMH), compiled by D.W. Krummel, Jean Geil, Doris J. Dyen, and Deane L. Root (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), the first reference work designed to provide access to the primary materials of American music history. The conference, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, was hosted by the Center for American Music, part of Pitt’s University Library System, in collaboration with the Society for American Music, a constituent member of the American Council of Learned Societies. The society maintains its headquarters at the University of Pittsburgh, and the staffs of the two organizations work closely together. The audience for an electronic version of RAMH will be international, including students and scholars of American studies throughout the world. Within the United States, it will include music and public librarians, the growing numbers of college students and faculty of American music, as well as K-12 teachers and students who work with source documents. No other bibliographical tool provides descriptions of the source materials for research and study for the full field of American music. The new RAMH2 will help meet the needs of today’s scholars by providing a search engine for primary sources in American music, whether in libraries, museums, historical societies, or private collections. RAMH2 will engage the wider scholarly community in building these resources so that the end result will be available to all online, will incorporate the needs of all who study these primary source materials in American music, and will continue to meet these needs in the future. The planning conference focused on four main topics: scope, sources, primary users, and searching services. Additional discussion addressed long-term maintenance and ongoing support. The first phase of the project would ideally reconstitute the original RAMH electronically, as a starting point for updating the collection descriptions and allowing for feedback. Subsequent phases would add collections and user features. While the conference did not answer all the questions, everyone there believed that the project is well worth doing and should start immediately. MOUG 2009 Annual Meeting The Music OCLC Users Group held its annual meeting February 17–18, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois. The first plenary session focused on the Library of Congress Working Group Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control. David Bade (University of Chicago) addressing the report from a cataloger's perspective, noted several shortcomings of the report, including its failure to acknowledge differing needs of various types of library users and the dismissal of subject area expertise. Tom Caw (University of Wisconsin–Madison) offered a critique from a public services angle. Caw suggested that librarians “acknowledge the different types of information needs that exist among users” without judging the importance of those needs relative to each other. In the “Ask MOUG” session, Michael Sarmiento (OCLC Public Services Liaison to MOUG) read two pre-submitted questions concerning WorldCat Local and their corresponding responses. Jay Weitz responded to questions from attendees about duplicate detection in Connexion (new software should begin running in 2009), the pending obsolescence of MARC field 440, and OCLC’s preparations for implementation of RDA: Resource Description and Access (OCLC has been actively participating in the RDA process through various ALA committees, and is planning for the RDA test and evaluation period). Responding to a question concerning OCLC possibly getting back into the local ILS business, both Sarmiento and Weitz told the assembled gathering that they were not aware of any such move in the U.S. at this time. The “Open Enhance” session began with Jay Weitz covering a number of news items, including implementation of OCLC-MARC Update 2009, duplicate detection, and automatic heading control in WorldCat. He then proceeded to talk about OCLC’s Expert Community Experiment, which will give full-level and higher OCLC users the ability to edit almost anything nearly all record types (exceptions are PCC, CIP, and Encoding Level 8 records). The effect of the Experiment on the Enhance program is unknown, and Weitz and Glenn Patton have been discussing future directions for the Enhance program. Caitlin Hunter (Library of Congress, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center) discussed “Special Considerations for Cataloging Ethnic Music Sound Recordings.” Explaining that search practices for ethnic music differ from those for Western art music, she outlined the more important search elements for ethnic music, and where such information may be included in MARC bibliographic records. The second plenary session, “Authority Records for Public Services,” featured Wendy Sistrunk (University of Missouri at Kansas City) and Stephen Luttmann (University of Northern Colorado) describing the usefulness of authority records as a reference tool. Sistrunk provided a brief explanation of authority record structure, and presented several examples of actual authority records. Luttmann noted that browsing the authority file in the Connexion interface is much easier than it was in the PRISM interface. He then pointed out that authority records are useful for determining correct uniform titles, especially for foreign language titles, and for giving biographical data that can help disambiguate persons with the same name, or even “reintegralize” two or more headings that represent the same person. For the full reports, and the minutes of the 2009 Business Meeting, please see the Music OCLC Users Group Newsletter, no. 101 (June 2009).
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| In Recognition | |
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These are the current Corporate Members and Corporate Patrons of MLA. We appreciate their support of MLA!
Corporate Members
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| Members’ Publications | |
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Please send citations for items published or premiered in the past calendar year to the column editor, Gary Boye, via e-mail or USPS mail at the address below. Please follow the citation style employed below. You must be a current MLA member to submit citations. Dr. Gary R. Boye Articles Moore, Tom (Duke University)
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| Calendar | |
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8–10 October 2009 Midwest Chapter Meeting 16 October 2009 26 October 2009 | |
| Cover Photos | |
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Photos “on the cover”: detail from annual meeting logo, courtesy of the Southern California Chapter; photo of Rattlesnake Creek near the University of Montana, courtesy of Laurie Sampsel . | |
Deadline: 1 November 2009
Print Abstract, single spaced, in the space below. NB: The abstract should be substantially the same when provided at the conference, so please consider it carefully as you write.
Name of applicant:
Tammy Ravas
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