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!

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 …

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!