As a career choice, music librarianship has many good points. But sometimes, as in any job, there are mundane days or even weeks.
After a fortnight’s annual leave and then the two conferences (musicology and music librarianship), I was prepared for the bulging inbox. Mind you, the physical intray wasn’t so bad – it didn’t necessitate an early coffee break, anyway!
But the donations had been proliferating behind my back. Now, I’m not ungrateful – far from it – but once they’ve arrived in my office (which I share with several people), they have to be sorted through and places found for them. At least these days we can download many of the catalogue records from a shared database. In the case of this particular donation from a publisher – only half of them were on the database. Guess which ones haven’t yet been catalogued?
Because there was another task screaming for my attention: rebranding. The rebranding of our institution means that all my beautifully authored library guides need rebranding, too.
We now have an official font, and all the spacing changed when I revised into the latest version of Word. Oh, joy!
Writing a conference report for the trust which sponsored my bursary, was a pleasure by comparison. As was the editing of some seminar notes into a newsletter article, and the updating of WhittakerLive, the performing arts blog which I author on behalf of the Library.
In between all of which, I was carefully saving useful weblinks to Diigo for possible future use either on WhittakerLive, or in information literacy and other library training. Did you know you can post a weblink via Diigo directly onto your blog? I now have a feed from Diigo to Delicious (which goes to Whittaker live); another from Bibliophile (RILM’s blog) to Whittaker live, and I’m using Diigo and Evernote synchronously on my android and two PCs. Being a music librarian doesn’t mean you have to be a techie-geek, but it helps. Want to follow me on Twitter? I’m karenmca. Stands to reason, really!
