MLA Conference Diary 2

The annual conference of the Music Library Association (USA) was held 25-28 February 2015 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Casey Mullin of Stanford University reflects on his experience.

Those who attended the Bibliographic Control Committee's Town Hall session might have heard me declare that 2015 would be the year of music vocabularies. This is not optimistic hyperbole. Both the Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus (LCMPT) and the music terms within the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) are now live and available for deployment in library catalogs. This means that the long-awaited future of faceted access to musical resources is here. Music librarians are very excited about this, and I don't just mean the motley crew who presented on this topic not once but twice in Denver (though we may be the self-styled cheerleaders). This crew included Janis Young and Thom Pease (LC), Hermine Vermeij (UCLA), Beth Iseminger (Harvard), Kevin Kishimoto (University of Chicago), Nancy Lorimer (Stanford) and myself.

On Tuesday, we gave a half-day workshop to the Music OCLC Users Group meeting attendees (who are mostly, but not all, music catalogers). This jam-packed session (both in terms of attendance and in content) covered background and history of the vocabulary projects; fundamental concepts underlying faceted access and thesaurus structure; best practices for application of terms; oodles of examples and exercises; and future steps of the endeavor, including conversion of legacy data (those pesky "subject" headings) and design changes that are needed in library discovery environments in order to take full advantage of this new approach. With this workshop, music catalogers are now encouraged to begin applying the new vocabularies, post haste!

On Saturday, four of us (Kevin, Hermine, Beth and myself) had the privilege of presenting on this topic again, to an even wider audience, in the MLA session "Exploring a Faceted World." Getting to take the stage in the Platte River Room, where we had all of cyberspace as our captive audience (OK, maybe that's hyperbolic!) in addition to the enthusiastic attendees in the room was a real treat.

Though I am on a high right now (multiple puns intended) with all of this, there remains much, much work to be done. BCC (which is now been rebranded the Cataloging and Metadata Committee) must now turn to the yeoman's work of moving the ball forward with conversion testing and implementation. We will also play an ongoing role in maintaining these vocabularies. But we need all music librarians to join us in the endeavor to improve our systems and thereby introduce a new level of music access to our users.