Attendees reported on their institutions. Remarks included descriptions of the physical arrangement of their departments (whether independent or part of a centralized technical services operation; the organizational structure; the employment climate; and various projects underway.

Beth Sweeney (Boston College) reported that she is cataloging a collection of sheet music, and asked how other members choose which cataloging language to use, and whether to catalog for collection-level access or title access.

Kevin Kishimoto described a CD-cataloging project of 20,000 CDs. There wasn’t time or labor available to provide individual bibliographic records for the collection, which was to be sent to offsite storage. He created a MARC(?) record for the collection. Publishing the accompanying spreadsheet of titles in Google Scholar gave at least limited title access to the individual CDs.

Most of those who were present reported that their libraries participate in offsite storage to some degree. The topic was a popular one, and the idea was advanced to consider submitting a session proposal for the St. Louis meeting, sponsored by the Technical Services Interest Group, on aspects of offsite storage for music materials. The MLA Board has announced that the theme for the St. Louis meeting will focus on issues of diversity and inclusion, and we might be able to take a look at how our selection process for items sent to offsite storage affects access by underrepresented groups, those who are disabled, an so forth.

We are considering putting together a session proposal for MLA 2016. We had several great discussions at the Denver meeting and one topic that seemed to get a lot of interest was Gifts. I think we may be considering a panel type session discussing different gift policies, particularly from a technical services perspective. 

However, we are open to more discussion on this!! I currently have 4 volunteers willing to work on refining a session proposal on this topic. If you would like to be a part of the discussion, please let me know (kscannell@uky.edu) and I can include you as well. I'm also open to just hearing your additional ideas if you don't want to volunteer but have an idea you want us to consider. Send me those ideas too!!

Thanks so much!!

Kerri Baunach