MLA Newsletter

Editor’s note: This part 1 of 2 for an interview with Michael Colby, transcribed by Marci Cohen and edited by Therese Dickman. Photo courtesy of Marci Cohen.

Cohen: It is Friday, February 28th. The year is 2020. I am Marci Cohen. I am interviewing Michael Colby for the Music Library Association oral history project. We are in Norfolk, Virginia at the Hilton Main at the 2020 annual meeting.

[Michael], we are going to review your whole career.  So, I am curious about how you got into music librarianship.  I also saw that you went to library school pretty much fresh out of undergrad. Did you know all along that you wanted to be a music librarian?

Colby: Hell, no! I wanted to be a musician. I was a clarinetist, and while I was still an undergraduate, I realized that that probably wasn’t going to be a way to support myself. I probably realized that when I had a failed audition for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I had gone to a community college for three years. Slow and steady was my way of doing things. They said I made the waiting list, but I think that was their way of telling you that you didn’t get in. I wound up at the University of Portland. I attended there for a year, and I didn’t like my major advisor, who was also the clarinet instructor. So, then I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I thought, “Oh, I’ll drop out and just work full-time.  After doing that for three months, I panicked and then I went to Portland State University. Then I realized, “Oh, if I go back to the University of Portland, I can finish up in another year, whereas if I stay at Portland State, it will take two more years.”  My major advisor didn’t get tenure, so he wouldn’t be there. [So] I went back to the University of Portland to finish up, not knowing what I was going to do. I decided that I needed to finish the bachelor of music in performance degree, majoring in clarinet, to figure out what to do next with my life.

My major advisor became Dr. Roger Doyle, who was the choir director, orchestra conductor, and the music history professor; he became my mentor there. [One day] he said, “Michael, you do well on the scholarly aspects of music. Have you ever thought of doing something like music librarianship?”  [I responded,] “What is that? Is that a thing?” “Oh, yes, definitely. You should read this book by Ruth Watanabe about music librarianship.” So I did that. And I thought, “Well, this is interesting. It sounds like something that maybe would work for me, because I always liked libraries.”

I have liked to read ever since I was young. I remember in the third grade, my mother coming back from the parent-teacher conferences and being very amused because the third-grade teacher said that “Michael read too much.” And I loved the library. I would rather be in the library than go out for recess. Many of the girls got to be library aides in grade school. I think in the fourth grade you could apply to be a library aide, and I applied. I was denied. I think it was a gender issue, but we’ll never know for sure. But libraries were in my background, and so it made sense for me to apply.

When I finished my degree from the University of Portland, I trotted off to the Multnomah County Library and applied for a job as a library clerk. I figured [that] I needed to earn some money, but I also wanted to get an idea of what it’s like to work in a library to see if it suited my personality. So I got a job, and it seemed to fit me. I got some experience, and I seemed to do pretty well. Then I earned my library degree, and things flowed on from there. So that’s how I got started. When I look back at turning points in my life, I realize that if it weren’t for Roger Doyle, my life could have gone in a completely different direction–maybe not such a good direction.

Cohen: How did you decide to focus on cataloging?

Colby: I think my entire career, I’ve been a chameleon, in that when I find myself in a situation, I adapt to it. When I started working in libraries, I really had no idea what cataloging and the catalog were, nor how catalogs were created. But I was a really good filer when I worked for the public library in Portland. Then, when I went to library school at Berkeley, I got a job as a work-study student in the music library. They quickly put me back in the cataloging department and had me first doing a really boring job. It had to do with retrospective conversion and keying in codes from cataloging cards into a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disc that was then going to be sent somewhere overseas for retrospective conversion. I don’t think anything ever came of that job. After a week or so of that, I started doing some conversion from printed [Library of Congress] LC records for scores into the RLIN [Research Libraries Group’s Research Libraries Information Network] database, and giving them MARC tags. As I learned cataloging in my classes [that year], I was soon trained on how to do original cataloging.

When I started applying for jobs, I applied for any library job in the country that had music in the job description. The only ones that I had interviews for, [however], were cataloging jobs. So that’s how I wound up doing music cataloging.

Cohen: You got your MLS from Berkeley. Was that chosen because it was the most convenient [for you]?

Colby: It was not the most convenient one. The closest school would have been the University of Washington. I was living in Oregon at the time, and there is no ALA-accredited library school in Oregon. There was some arrangement whereby I could get in-state tuition in a Western school, which would have included Washington, Colorado, maybe Arizona, and California. The program at Berkeley could be finished in twelve months, whereas the University of Washington would take two years, time was money, and time was of the essence, because I didn’t have a lot of financial support. I’m from a blue-collar background, and my parents helped me a bit getting through my bachelor’s. But after that, it was like, “Kid, you’re on your own from here.” So it made sense to get the degree as soon as I could, get out in the world, and start taking care of myself. Berkeley had a good music library and a good reputation as a library school.

Cohen: You got your first position out of library school at Bowling Green State University, so that took you across the country. Is there anything you want to talk about regarding your first job, and how that experience went for you?

Colby: It was the third job interview I had and the first job offer that I got. The first job interview was at Loyola University in New Orleans. I definitely would have taken that job. Mark McKnight got that job, though; I didn’t hold it against him.

Bowling Green was a good job. It was in Ohio–a part of the country that I had never been in before. It just wasn’t a good fit for me at the time. I feel bad that I was only there a year before returning to the West Coast, but for a lot of personal reasons, I felt like that’s what I needed to do at the time. I worked next at the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL), which was a large library. But it was a left turn in my career, because I feel that public libraries are looked down on by some people, and I felt that I did a lot of good work as a cataloger in a public library. Having worked one entire year in an academic library, I felt that the working conditions were a little better [there], and I wanted to get back into an academic setting. But it was difficult to get out of a public library and into an academic library. I worked at the SFPL for seven years and did a lot of good work there. It had its challenges [though]. [Colby later noted: “One of the reasons for leaving the public library was job stability. Cutbacks and layoffs were not uncommon in the public library world at that time, especially that library.  That wasn’t the case then in academic libraries, as far as I was aware.”]

Cohen: Was the decision to get your master’s in music history the goal of getting you back into academic libraries?

Colby: You’re pretty sharp, Marci. This was exactly it.

Cohen: And you got that from San Francisco State University in 1990.

Colby: Right. While working full-time at San Francisco Public Library, I was able to go part-time to San Francisco State University and pursue my master’s in music history there. While attending the school there, the [October 17, 1989] Loma Prieta earthquake happened. I was in my advanced music theory class at San Francisco State–which is way out by the ocean–when the earthquake hit.  So that was interesting to be there in the middle of a class when the earthquake hit.

Cohen: Scary. From there you made the jump and you got back into academia at the University of California Davis. Did you anticipate that you would spend the rest of your career there?

Colby: I did not. It’s interesting that I actually landed there because I alluded to the prejudice against public librarians in academic libraries. It was probably a matter of luck that I was offered the job there because I interviewed there. I didn’t hear anything for quite a while, which is never a good sign. Then I got a phone call. Would I come back for a second interview? I went back. I got this feeling from the interview committee that they didn’t really have any more questions to ask me. They just wanted to look at me again. I got the offer. After I came back and worked there a while, I finally heard the story that they had offered the job to another candidate who had turned it down. I think they were left in a lurch. Then I heard that some people on the interview committee felt that I shouldn’t be offered the job because I was a public librarian and consequently I wouldn’t be able to live up to the rigors of working in an academic library. Well, I think I showed them eventually.

Cohen: Did it take long to settle back into that different realm after being in the public library for a while?

Colby: No. There definitely were differences—especially as a cataloger—but there were a lot of similarities too. I think the people who exhibit such academic versus public librarian prejudices focus more on the differences than the similarities. The SFPL, being a big public library, got a lot of the same kinds of materials that an academic library [does]. So, I had many of the skill sets that I needed to be successful in an academic library.

Cohen: I would also think, in something as large as the San Francisco Public Library, that you’re dealing with researchers and professional performers, not just hobbyists. That is your patron base, and there’s a higher level. There’s a range of musical interests among the patrons that you ultimately serve.

Colby: Part of the challenge for me in taking the job at UC-Davis was that, when I was in San Francisco, I was just a cataloger.  The Davis job included instruction, reference, and collection development in music, which I hadn’t done before. Getting the MA in music history helped prepare me for that part of the job. For the music faculty, that was part of their concern in hiring me. “You haven’t done this before. What prepares you for this?” I acknowledged that “No, I have not done this before.” I had done a teeny bit at Bowling Green. It wasn’t part of my job description there, but I asked, and I worked with the late Linda Fidler, the music librarian there at the time. She let me do some instruction in classes, so I had some teaching experience. Although a stretch, it was something I thought I could do.

Cohen: What were some of your favorite parts of working at UC Davis?

Colby: Being able to wear multiple hats and be a different person. To be a cataloger and do that part, and [also] be an instruction person and do this completely different thing that I hadn’t done for most of my previous eight years of my career. To interact with faculty, something that I had not been doing the seven years that I was at San Francisco because we had no faculty at the San Francisco Public Library. And just having a lot of different opportunities to do things in the academic environment that the public library didn’t [offer]. For instance, when I was at Davis, the head of systems came to me and said, “Do you want to do a web page for music in the library?” I was the first subject person who was asked to do a web page, which was interesting. I know I wouldn’t have been asked to do that in the public library [then] So to be given some of those opportunities was nice.

Cohen: Yeah, it seems like it’s rare to have a position where you’re doing both technical services and public-facing duties. Did you see your work on one side informing your work on the other?

Colby: Oh, definitely. It was interesting to have the two different responsibilities—to first order a score and then to be the person to shepherd it through and see that it gets cataloged quickly and accurately.

Cohen: How big is UC Davis? Is the music program small enough that you were working both sides of that?

Colby: It’s a large school, but the music program is not large. They focus on musicology and ethnomusicology and not so much performance, which accounts for the smaller size of the program. It made sense to have somebody who could do both cataloging and music and not two different people [to] do the same thing.

Cohen: Your involvement in MLA:  It looks like you first started getting involved in the organization when you were at San Francisco Public Library. Do you want to talk about your inroads there and what you started doing?

Colby: I first got involved in MLA because of a friendship I made when I was in library school at Berkeley. This person was Richard Koprowski, and he was part of that New York crowd. He’s ten years older than me, but he knew people like Jane Gottlieb and John Shepard, and he’d worked for Suki Sommer.  He was a musicology major, PhD candidate at Columbia, and he’d worked for the New York Public Library, but he didn’t have his library degree. He had come to Berkeley to get [that]. Although he had these different work experiences, he befriended me there at Berkeley. We were in the same classes and worked in the music library. He said, “You have to get involved in MLA! You need to do this. You’ll meet the right people, and all of that.” He’s the one who got me intrigued and interested in MLA and really encouraged me to go to the annual meeting, which was in Austin, Texas that year. I couldn’t afford to do it, but he got me to go to the chapter meetings that were in the area then. That’s really what got me interested in going to MLA at that time. Then when I got my first job at Bowling Green, the [1985 MLA] meeting was in Louisville, Kentucky, which was close enough to drive [to] in just a few hours. So I went to my first meeting there. [Richard Koprowski], who had a job with RLG, the Research Libraries Group, was at the MLA meeting then. He introduced me to people and really helped to get me involved in MLA at that point. So he was really one of the people who helped me get started in MLA.

Cohen: Do you want to talk about some of the different activities that you’ve done with an MLA chapter or, obviously, leading up to being president? What are some of the things you’ve done over the years in the organization?

Colby: I got involved in the [regional] chapter fairly early on, and it’s one of the ways that younger or newer people in the profession can get involved–through the chapter. There’s a lower bar to involvement. I had only been a librarian for a few years when I was asked if I would run for vice-chair/chair-elect of the chapter. I ran against a more senior member, and I thought, “Okay, great. I’ll be on the ballot, and this other person will be elected. I’ll be fine.” Well, she didn’t show up to the meeting where they voted, so I think that contributed to me being elected. It was like, “Here I am, vice-chair of this chapter,” and I’d [only] been a librarian for like three years or something. So that got me involved. You get to know a lot of people. I definitely got involved on a local level in that way.

I also got involved through the cataloging side, through the Subject Access Subcommittee, of which was then called the Bibliographic Control Committee, the BCC. But there was also some frustration there because I really wanted to be on the Descriptive Cataloging Committee because I had a concern about generic terms and uniform titles, and I had made a list of generic terms that weren’t addressed. I talked to the chair of that subcommittee, and wanted to be on it. [But] I wasn’t appointed, and I was really disappointed. I had this feeling that I was an outsider because I was from the West Coast, I wasn’t a protégé of Ralph Papakhian or Richard Smiraglia, and I didn’t have connection to Eastman, and because of that, well, I didn’t have a chance. It was discouraging. I realize now that it wasn’t stacked against me. There were a lot of people who had been in the organization longer who were vying for positions on this committee.  There are only so many positions and everybody gets a chance.

Just because the first time you put your name up for a particular position in MLA and you don’t get it doesn’t mean that MLA doesn’t like you or doesn’t need your activities. Years later when I was a committee chair or president, and I heard somebody say, “Oh, I didn’t get what I wanted. That means the committee or the association doesn’t like or doesn’t want me.” It hurt because you know how they feel. Your heart bleeds for them. You feel their pain. But you know that’s not true. I won’t name names, but I remember one woman who was on the slate for member-at-large of the board of directors twice and wasn’t elected either time. She  said,“Well, obviously, people don’t like me. I’m not going to be involved in the organization anymore.” That’s not true. It’s just the way the cards play. And [such a response] is sad.

Cohen: Focusing on MLA, you’ve got a long list [of committees on which you served]: the Working Group on Electronic Music, Working Group on Terminology, Nominations Committee, Online Reference Services Committee, and the Music Thesaurus Project Advisory Task Force. Then you were elected to the board as a member-at-large. Do you want to talk about that?

Colby: That stunned me, really. When you see a slate [of candidates] for the board, it breaks my heart when I see really good people who have done incredible work, and you look at the other -[candidate] names and you [realize], “These people have name recognition. They’re going to be elected, and this [other] person [probably] is not.” It’s just because of name recognition. So this slate came out, and I saw the names on it:  Dan Zager, Debbie Campana, three other people, and me. I thought, “It’s gonna be Dan, Debbie, and one of these other people. I should be grateful that I was considered amongst them and I was on the slate”. I got elected, [though], and I was just floored. It was lucky that I had given a presentation at the annual meeting before that [election].. [So] I had some recognition at that point.

I was interested and flattered to be on the board, but terrified. When I attended [one] or two-hour meetings at my institution, at the end, [I would think,] “I’m so glad to get out of this room!” And board meetings were two or two and a half days of full meetings. I [wondered], “How am I going to survive this?” But we had agendas, we stuck to them, and we accomplished things. It was invigorating and tiring work, but we got things done. So after two years, I was exhausted, but [I thought], “Well, I would do that again.” When other opportunities came up to serve on the board, I took them. I did it again. [Some might say] I was a glutton for punishment.

Cohen: You became the recording secretary from 2001 to 2006.

Colby: I did, yeah.

Cohen: And then you ran for president.

Colby: I did.

Cohen: And you won. We should acknowledge that as well.

Colby: I did. Amazing.

Editor’s note: Part 2 will be published in Issue 211. Stay tuned!