Being a Music Librarian: Never a Typical Day

August 7, 2016 by Karen Mcaulay

What do academic music librarians do? There’s never a typical day. Today, I’ve catalogued a shiny new series of Paris Conservatoire competition anthologies for various instruments; am working my way through three shelves of wind and brass sets in order to improve the accessibility of the big band charts that lurk amongst them; and have had a conversation (email and phone) about Scottish plainsong, with a scholarly enquirer. And there’s time for more variety yet! Meanwhile – back to the jazz charts … ‘accessibility’ is my middle name.

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Written by Karen Mcaulay

Karen McAulay divides her time between librarianship and musicology. 2012-15, was seconded part-time to an AHRC funded project into Scottish fiddle tune collections, contributing bibliographical and musicological data to the Historical Music of Scotland website http://hms.scot (blog http://www.music.arts.gla.ac.uk/bassculture/). She's currently researching the University of St Andrews' historic music copyright collection, & was recently awarded an AHRC networking grant to extend this research nationally. As well as speaking on her research specialism, she is also in demand to talk about research skills and her career as a part-time researcher.

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