The following post comes to us from Dustin Ludeman, Senior Librarian at NYPL/BookOps, and recipient of GNYMLA’s first-ever travel grant to attend the MLA national meeting.
Thanks to the encouragement of the GNYMLA Chapter, I was finally able to attend my first MLA Annual Meeting last week in Portland, Oregon. Being a cataloger, I also took the opportunity to attend the coordinated meeting of the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG). Eric, GNYMLA Chair, has invited me to share some reflections on my time in Portland. I’ll do so through some general comments followed by my impressions of select conference events.
The most immediately striking aspect of the Association, to me, was its generational diversity. I was pleased to see so many newer librarians in attendance. At the reception for new attendees—and, to my surprise, there were dozens of newbies like me!—I had the pleasure of meeting students still in library school as well as recent graduates serving in their first professional position.
During the course of the week, I had the opportunity to meet others who have attended MLA for several years now and are already establishing themselves as up-and-comers in the field. Many newer librarians are taking active roles in the Association, which is certainly something to aspire to.
Extending a week full of so much activity might not at first seem desirable—especially to the easily overwhelmed like me!—but attending MOUG, which takes place during the two days preceding MLA, eased me gently into the conference atmosphere.
A highlight of Tuesday was Chuck Peters’ presentation on “Acquiring new music from unconventional sources: PDF copies in the library,” in which the many complexities of handling born-digital scores were discussed. These include issues surrounding licensing, cataloging, and processing. (Perhaps the single most useful piece of information to gather at a professional conference is who knows about what. If I’m ever tasked to deal with scores in digital formats, Chuck will be hearing from me!).
Sessions related to cataloging were not at all exiled to the MOUG meeting as I had once assumed. In addition to several talks associated with cataloging were: the Cataloging and Metadata Town Hall, meetings of the Cataloging and Metadata Committee (CMC) and its subcommittees, and interest group meetings on various discovery and integrated library systems.
As one should, I think, I did make sure to attend some sessions outside of my primary area of interest, but I’ll only mention here a couple of sessions that bear more directly on my daily work. There was opportunity to ingest a wealth of such information During the CMC Vocabularies Subcommittee meeting, for example, the report of the LCMPT/LCGFT Maintenance Task Group included information about newly-defined terms, revised definitions of existing terms, revised hierarchies in these thesauri, and other developments in the pipeline.
On Thursday, a session “Bound for glory: binders’ volumes in a 21st century reading” featured speakers from the Sheet Music Interest Group, including several who discussed their institutions’ approach to cataloging sheet music bound into large volumes. The most persuasive approach was that of Mark Scharff, who catalogs them “in analytics,” providing access to each piece within the volume, in effect rendering it “Virtually Disbound” (the title of his portion of the session, I believe). I must also mention the impressive geographic visualizations created by Karen Stafford using Stanford’s Palladio platform, which did much to illuminate the cultural history of a set of 19th-century binders’ volumes.
Personally, the biggest “game changer” was Friday’s session by Gary Strawn and Casey Mullin on “Deriving faceted terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings for music.” Gary has programmed a tool, including a useful OCLC macro, to populate MARC 382 and 655 fields based on existing Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in MARC 650 and other data.
The tool fills in appropriate terms from the Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus (LCMPT) and the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT). The retrospective implementation of these and other faceted vocabularies is looking all the more feasible with this impressive new development.
Thanks to the input of music catalogers, specifically the CMC Vocabularies Subcommittee, the tool is already able to handle many complicated situations. Certain free-floating subdivisions in LCSH, for example, often render a direct 1-to-1 relationship between terms in LCSH and faceted vocabularies inappropriate. I have already started to use the tool and am eager to follow its continued development and implementation.
As an aside, I’d like to give a plug to Michelle Hahn and company’s MLA Newsletter no. 194bis, I’m at MLA… now what? It was the pre-conference pep talked I didn’t know I needed. I would encourage those attending any sort of professional meeting, whether for the first time or not, to read this special issue, which contains advice from a multitude of perspectives. I’ll be making a habit of reading through it every year.
Finally, I would like to extend special thanks to our officers—Eric Mortensen, Colin Bitter, and Michael Crowley—for their kind support and for the responsibilities they continue to carry out on behalf of our chapter. Sincere thanks are also due to the membership of the GNYMLA as a whole, without whose generosity I would have been unable to travel to Portland. I was proud to attend my first Annual Meeting as a newer member of your fine chapter!
Dustin Ludeman