Education Committee Annual Report 2023

submitted by Brendan Higgins

Current Roster

  • Brendan Higgins, chair, 2026
  • Elizabeth Berndt, 2024
  • Ana Dubnjakovic, 2026
  • Amy Edmonds, 2024
  • Christine Edwards, 2024
  • Donna Maher, 2027
  • Jennifer Martin, 2025
  • Anna Grau Schmidt, 2025
  • Leonora Schneller, 2027

List of Previous Goals and Progress Made

  • 1. Continue to offer and develop new e-education opportunities, with a commitment towards finding presenters from underrepresented populations and content that includes DEIA issues in music libraries.
    • The only ALA e-education presentation was a second running of the Fundamentals of Music Cataloging Bundle. There have been two submissions of webinars to ALA, but neither of them were chosen to be presented. Another group of possible webinars is being prepared by MLA members, with the hopes of running at the end of 2023 or early 2024.
  • 2. Create a listing of music librarianship instructors and guest lecturers that can be accessed by MLA and graduate library schools.
    • The task force has met to determine how this information will be gathered and stored. A survey to interested MLA members is forthcoming in Fall 2023.
  • 3. Consult with our e-education instructors to provide open access to presentation materials via the Education Committee website.
    • I requested that the presenters of the Music Cataloging bundle add their slides to the Humanities Commons, though most ultimately decided not to submit. Since the slides were part of a multi-week eCourse, the presenters felt that there was too much interactivity or too little context in their slides to be useful on their own. I will encourage future webinar presenters to consider uploading to the Commons instead.

List of Future Goals

  • 1. Continue to offer new e-education opportunities, with a commitment towards finding presenters from underrepresented populations and content that includes DEIA issues in music libraries.
    • This is an ongoing charge for our committee, which touches upon many of the objectives within Goal 2 of the Strategic Plan (Develop and Retain Membership). With our organizations renewed commitment to DEIA, our committee will make a focused effort to include more diverse voices to our programming (Cultivate Inclusivity, Objective 3.1)
  • 2. Compile and provide access to the forthcoming  listing of music librarianship instructors and guest lecturers that can be accessed by MLA and graduate library schools.
    • This database is meant to connect the expertise of the music librarians in our organization with library school educators and other e-education institutions (Organize strategically, Objective 1.3), which will broaden the awareness of our organization and help educate the next generation of music librarians (Develop and Retain Membership, Objective 2.6).
  • 3. Explore the potential of creating instructional videos as open educational resources on different aspects of music librarianship. Start the outreach process with individuals on the instructor listing.
    • This is a proposed second phase of the Music Librarianship Instructors list. The videos would be freely accessible (Organize strategically, Objective 1.6) and cover a wide range of topics in our profession (Develop and Retain Membership, 2.4)