Just supposing you were contemplating a career in music librarianship, let me tell you about a day in the life of a college music librarian.

I’ve been asked to talk to doctoral students about bibliographical databases. The choice is between two we don’t subscribe to, and two that are free. One of these needs Firefox as the browser. For me, this meant uploading various different software packages and starting to get my head around them. After that, the document that started out as an introduction to the subject, ended up as a brief report on the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. And I still haven’t planned the seminar for those unsuspecting doctors-in-waiting. I think I may have to take my own laptop in order to show off the package that I used myself, in my own doctoral researches.

I’ve had an exchange of emails with the support-line for Mendeley, and – simultaneously – email correspondence about Shibboleth logins to electronic resources; about music and book purchase requests; about the best way of cataloguing journals; and setting up a new area in our library VLN pages.

Coffee-time was spent learning how to pronounce Gaelic song-titles for a talk I’m giving this weekend. But then again, I am a musicologist as well as a librarian, so what goes on in my spare time isn’t really part of a typical day!

I left at 5 pm – office hours are an advantage – not having catalogued a single book, and having barely looked at a crotchet or a quaver all day. Though I did find a Christmas carol that someone was looking for. Such is the life of a college music librarian!

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!

I started by doing a Research Masters into Mediaeval English plainsong at Exeter. My first mistake was to change subject from plainsong to polyphony for my PhD.  I’m not sure why I decided to switch – it’s all back in the mists of time now.  I don’t remember anyone trying to stop me, but maybe I was too headstrong to have listened!  Suffice to say, I hadn’t finished it by the time I went to library school.  And that was my second mistake: I’d have been wiser to have taken a part-time job for a year while I finished the PhD.

After a year of concentrated study for my postgraduate librarianship diploma at Aberystwyth, I tried to resume the threads of my research, but somehow I’d run out of steam. By now I was working towards becoming a chartered member of the Library Association, and to be honest, it was hard to continue doctoral studies at the same time.  I paid my writing-up fees for a couple more years, before admitting defeat.

Twenty-five years later, I discovered some nineteenth century flute manuscripts at work, and did a small research project into their origins.  A chance coffee-break conversation with the then Head of Music at RSAMD led to my decision to resume doctoral studies again.  This time, I did a PhD part-time, in my spare time, at the University of Glasgow.  I was advised to do my research at Glasgow, because the subject didn’t fit my own institution’s practice-based research ethos.  I was more than happy to do this: it helped me keep my working and my research lives separate, and there was no risk of bumping into my supervisor and being tempted away into research activity during the day!

In 25 years, I had moved some 500 kilometres north both in real and research terms, and five centuries forward for my research subject. I’d also acquired a husband, three sons and a full-time job.  Notwithstanding these distractions, I submitted my thesis on 18^th and 19^th Century Scottish song collecting, five years to the day after registration as a doctoral student.

Going into research as a recycled postgraduate was completely different to the first time around.  In future postings, I‘ll expand on this further.