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!

Time went by, and the inner commentary changed.   “If I’d been a young mother, I’d have kids your age by now.”  But I hadn’t, and I didn’t.

I won’t bore you with the bits in between then and now.  Suffice to say that I’ve been showing other people’s young adults around the college library all week, and this morning our eldest son left for Cambridge on the 6.50 train, excited and terrified in equal measure at the new adventure ahead of him.  And I went home for tea and toast before work, equally excited and terrified on his behalf, reflecting that it really didn’t seem that long since he was born!   Furthermore, despite having spent 18 years agonizing over whether we were getting this parenting thing right, the end destination suggests that perhaps, on the whole, we have!

The fact that I have seen so many freshers come and go doesn’t make it any better, though.  I know about freshers’ fairs, and pub-crawls, and parties.  The student union rep delegated to remain sober.  The sore heads.  And then the poor things have to learn how to use the IT set-up, get toured around the library, and humour the old librarian by taking a fistful of leaflets that they would rather not read.  Or at least, not this week!

This might explain why my tours have become shorter, chattier, and very much more sympathetic, as the years have gone by!  And I hope someone in Cambridge is as gentle with our own shiny new, keen fresher, as I try to be with the dozens that come my way.

So this week, your music information specialist found it necessary to post links about the Edinburgh Festivals, Glasgow’s Piping Live (and the launch of the Piping Centre’s ‘Noting the Tradition’ project, which I attended), and various research-support projects that I’ve come across.  Like #phdchat, on Twitter.  There’s also a #phdchat wiki on pbworks, and now there’s a blogspot blog, too.  I feel a bit like an octopus, reaching out to grab all these interesting ideas to pass on, in the hope they’ll appeal to our staff and student readers.

This is all well and good, but eventually I reach the stage where I feel I’m constantly connected.  It’s all useful stuff, but the more I draw into my web, the more I feel I’m only engaging with things at the most surface level.  At this point, I need to turn the computer and mobile phone off before I go bonkers!  Mind you, http://WhittakerLive.blogspot.com is looking good these days, and I like to think interest in it is increasing.  I’m also getting to “know” quite a few people with similar professional interests to my own.

At the end of my week off, I find I’ve got quite a bit of domesticity done, burned a few calories at the leisure centre, not to mention writing a conference report and turning a presentation into a journal article.  Result!  If I could just find the strength of mind to keep away from the internet for the weekend, I’d probably feel more rested when I get back to the office.  Being a workaholic isn’t always a good thing …

I was determined to provide audio clips for my Minstrels and Metaphors paper at IAML 2011 in Dublin this week.  I engaged a thoroughly modern minstrel (one of our students). We rehearsed, and I booked the studio.  Unfortunately, even modern minstrels have human frailties, and mine lost her voice 36 hours before the recording session.

I texted back what any self-respecting professional would say: “Don’t worry about it – I’ll sort something out.”

And I did – I sang to my own accompaniment. Problem solved.  Apart, that is, from the fact that I’m not a trained singer.  I don’t like the sound of my own voice, so I disliked the majority of my tracks.

However, I discovered an out-of-print CD with a couple of the Thomas Moore songs, and Hyperion helpfully provided me with an authorised copy, within just 24 hours.  So there I was, all dressed up and ready to go.  Two recordings of my piano-playing (perfectly acceptable); one of my self-accompanied singing (tolerable); one of my tracks strategically dropped;  and two very nice Hyperion ones.

Off I flew to Belfast, chaired a session, proceeded south to Dublin, and dived into the second conference.  Twenty minutes before the appointed hour, I presented myself at the podium of an absolutely huge auditorium (400-seater lecture theatres are larger than I’m used to!), and handed over the discs.

The machine swallowed the first one, refused to recognise it, play it or eject it.  (Did a higher power cause this to happen to spare my blushes?)  The moral, of course, is to save the track to a memory stick and embed it in the PowerPoint.  I could have kicked myself.  The disc was finally ejected and handed back to me after a further two presentations.

I suppose there are some things that you just learn the hard way!  It was fortunate, to say the least, that another speaker had coincidentally played one of the Irish songs that I would have finished up with, so the audience had already heard what Moore’s songs sound like.   At any event, I will know better another time.  You can never be too well-prepared.

The positive side was that I had more time for the presentation, which went like a dream and was favourably received. Thank heavens for that! 

(I’m preparing the paper to submit to the Editor of Fontes, but in the meantime, readers might like to visit my web-page on Minstrels and Metaphors - it’s a page I added to our performing arts blog, WhittakerLive.)

I couldn’t have known that “thin on the ground” in the mid-eighties, would become “as rare as hens’ teeth” by the late noughties.  How ironic, though, that I rejected the choice when I might have had one.  Indeed, by not completing the first doctorate, the question of postdoctoral research simply never arose.  I had already jumped ship by failing to complete.

Turn the clock forward a quarter of a century, though, and the landscape has changed.  I’ve conducted seminars, sure I have.  I’ve spent most of my working life helping students – mainly, but by no means solely on a one-to-one basis – and given countless papers.  I don’t need to imagine myself doing it now!

And of course, I’ve completed a doctorate.  I don’t need anyone to tell me that the second piece of work was better than the unfinished first attempt.  Even if I’d finished the first thesis, I don’t think it would have been as good a piece of research, and certainly, the subject of late eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish song-collecting has not only proved interdisciplinary (not even a consideration in the eighties), but also attracts more interest both from scholars and the wider community.  I’ve never, ever been asked, ‘But why Scottish song?’  I was regularly asked, ‘But why PLAINsong?!

But, as I mentioned, the landscape and climate have shifted underfoot.  A postdoc position?  Almost impossible to find, and from a personal perspective, barely feasible, for who with family commitments would exchange permanence for something less?!

So, here I am.  Knowing that it is conventional to speak and publish widely in the first postdoctoral year, I’ve been deeply, deeply conventional!  But now, a year on?

I’ll address that in my next post!