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!

I needed a research subject that interested and motivated me, because fitting in part-time study on top of a full-time professional job was going to be challenging.  (I’ll blog about that another time.)  I was self-funded, so there was no pressure on me to pursue any particular research path, but I still needed to justify my research to myself as something that would be useful and relevant to me in my work.

I also had in mind the library research trips I’d been accustomed to make during my Exeter research days.  Who remembers microfilms?  Ughh!  But the reality was that, before the digital age, you either had to get a microfilm of a manuscript, or you made a trip to go and study it in person.  Remembering those time-consuming trips from Exeter to Shrewsbury, London and Oxbridge, and conscious that I still wouldn’t be able to get digitised copies of everything that interested me, I needed relatively easy access to the majority of my sources.  Most of my Scottish materials were accessible within a day-trip – and that’s quite important when you’ve got a family waiting for you at home!

And actually, I could trace a common thread between the Masters’ plainsong research and what I was doing now – tenuous, I’ll grant you, but both dealt with the transmission of repertoires in some sense.  The difference was that I was now considering cultural issues as well – and that was fascinating.

So my subject was chosen partly out of pragmatism, partly out of passion, and partly … well, why does anyone do research?  For the same reason that people climb mountains.  Because they’re there!