MLA Conference Diary 3

Treshani Perera, graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, reflects on her experience at the annual conference of the Music Library Association (USA), held 2-5 March 2016 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Editor's note: Archived video from MLA 2016 as well as presentation materials from past conferences are available on the MLA website.

Take me back to MLA 2016 Cincinnati: Oral Histories, Web Archiving, Gift Processing, and a Big Band in action!

“MOUG/MLA 2016, you exceeded my expectations with engaging sessions, non-stop laughter, fun people, and kept me inspired all week!‪#‎goodbyefornow ‪#‎illbebackformuslib2017”

I left MLA 2016 after yet another refreshing conference experience, and the above Facebook status update right before leaving the Cincinnati airport captured my rejuvenated state of mind after 5 days of engaging sessions, new professional connections, familiar faces, and a whole lot of fun in the name of professional development. I could go on about everything I loved about MLA 2016, but given below are highlights and takeaways from three sessions that I found really interesting.

With a current internship experience in oral histories, naturally I had to attend the session Tell Me Something Good: Oral History Best Practices for Music Librarians (Thursday, March 3, 3.30pm) co-presented by Anne Rhodes (Yale University), Andy Leach (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives), and Krista White (Rutgers University). Overall takeaways of the session include how to conduct oral history interviews, recording sufficient metadata on physical containers and electronic inventory systems, documenting procedures for consistency from the point of carrying out the interview to creating digital collections, and managing rights and ethical issues in oral history collections. I found the Q&A session following the presentation to be the most engaging as it covered challenges and project management issues related to doing oral histories and creating oral history digital collections. For anyone interested in starting an oral history series or embarking on an oral history digital collection, I would highly recommend the recording of this session available on the MLA 2016 Vimeo channel.

After attending MLA THATCamp in Denver last year, I was really excited to attend the Digital Humanities (DH) hands-on workshop series this year! Although I couldn’t attend every single one of the workshops, I really enjoyed attending the session titled Web Archiving for Music Librarians (Saturday, March 5, 11.00am) by Kent Underwood (NYU). The session wasn’t recorded, but you can get access to the slides here. To broadly define Web Archiving, it is a static snapshot of a website or webpage preserving its “contents, appearance, and behavior as it existed at particular points in time.” Kent’s presentation covered everything from why music scholars, librarians, and institutions need to care about preserving web presence for posterity and future research interests, to web-based services such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and Archive-It that have built-in features for active and passive web curation. The session also covered copyright and access issues surrounding web archiving, and why web archiving is crucial in the digital age.

Expecting the Unexpected: Gifts Workflows in Technical Services (Saturday, March 5, 2.30pm) co-presented by Charles Peters (Indiana University), Jennifer Olson (University of Hartford), and Michelle Hahn (Indiana University, but session was based on her experience at Southern Methodist University) was one of the last sessions at MLA 2016, and it definitely was a good session to end a great conference experience that started with MOUG 2016. (Talk about coming full circle!) The session wasn’t recorded, but slides are available here. Each speaker discussed their respective institution’s practices in gift processing, which included collection development policies accommodating gifts, workflows from accepting gifts to items reaching the shelf post-processing, creating inventories for “best copy” assessment, and including student workers and their subject-specific knowledge in accepting donations. In some cases, as Michelle Hahn pointed out, a leaking roof or limited shelving may force institutions to prioritize and get the ball rolling on gift processing. All three speakers highlighted the importance of documentation along the way, keeping track of statistics, and prioritizing according to institutional needs.

All work must end with play, and MLA-ers know how to have a good time with a locally-formed big band, talented solo acts, and even a few dancers. I’m already looking forward to attending the first ever Pan-American Regional IAML meeting in Orlando next February, and making new professional connections with Canadian and Latin American music librarians. It’s guaranteed to be a grand Pan-American affair, and one that will add to the memories of learning, networking, and celebrating new and old professional connections and friendships. Hope to see you in Orlando!