MLA Goes Pan American!

by Kirstin Dougan, MLA Program Chair 2017, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Music Library Association will be hosting the first Pan American regional IAML meeting in Orlando, Florida from February 22-26, 2017 in collaboration with CAML, its Canadian counterpart. MLA President Michael Rogan can be credited with the idea to think globally and push MLA to go past its current boundaries. The goals of such a meeting are to share information across borders and broaden librarianship's horizons.

The program will feature speakers from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, the United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, and France. There will be three plenaries: one featuring Latin American libraries and collections, one featuring Canadian libraries and collections, and one from the US about linked data and MLA's role in it. IAML will host three events at the conference—a presentation aimed at Latin American attendees titled Music Librarianship, Preservation, and Documentation Worldwide: The IAML Board Presents; a small reception for the IAML, CAML, and MLA Boards to get to know the Latin American attendees (and vice versa), and a session titled IAML Latin America Forum with many of the Latin American speakers presenting brief reports. This forum will be presented in the streaming room at the conference and will be available online to those who cannot attend the conference, for a small access fee. Many recorded presentations from the streaming room will be made available after the conference and captioned with Spanish and Portuguese and English translations.

The Latin American participants will, along with American and Canadian colleagues, be presenting throughout the conference about their libraries, collections, and initiatives. Presentation topics cover a broad range of topics in librarianship, including, "A Framework for Collaboration: Engaging Faculty in Information Literacy through the ACRL Framework," "Teresa Carreño: Issues of Access, Memory, and {Digital} Scholarship," "Scores of Scores : what to do with the growing number of scores on YouTube," "The FUTURE is NOW! Preparing For and Learning From Large-Scale Media Preservation," Music Collections in Uncertain Economic Times: A Survey of Canadian Academic Music Libraries," "Library and Archive of the Cuban Musicology : Stories and Strategies," and many more. Full program information can be found here.

Information about registering for the conference and accommodations can be found here.

With contributions from MLA President Michael Rogan.