Reported by Catherine Hammer and Casey Burgess
Each year the Best of Chapters committee accepts the nomination of one session presentation from each local MLA chapter. The three committee members evaluate the sessions separately and rate them based on a variety of factors: relevance of the topic to current issues in music librarianship, originality and innovation, organization and significance, research quality, and potential appeal to a national-level audience. The rankings from each member are combined to determine the two highest-ranked sessions that will be presented at the next national MLA meeting.
At the 2022 virtual MLA conference, the winning presentation was “Clarinetists in the Stacks: a Clarinet Studio’s Role in Expanding Inclusive Holdings” from Lenora Schneller, Director of the Music and Fine Arts Libraries at Cornell University. Ms. Schneller works as both a music librarian and a clarinet instructor at Cornell, and as such, she shared about her unique opportunity to seek out new and diverse clarinet works that would better reflect the experiences and backgrounds of her students and add them to the library’s collection. These new acquisitions serve a dual purpose of diversifying the library’s music collection as well as providing her students with the opportunity to reach beyond previously considered standard repertoire. For example, Schneller has added works by composers Chen Yi, Joan Tower, Alvin Batiste, Clarence Cameron White, and Florence B Price.
The Best of Chapters runner-up was “Researching the Negro Spiritual” from Kathy Abromeit, Public Services Librarian at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and Randye Jones, Media Collections Coordinator at Grinnell College. Ms. Abromeit discussed her ongoing indexing project of spirituals using uniform titles, first line of the song, alternate titles, subject, scripture references, and additional information such as accompanying instrumentation or unique notation. Ms. Jones walked attendees through a proposed reference interaction using The Spirituals Database, a free online resource she developed. She discussed the use of various facets to narrow search results to identify individual arrangements or recordings of spirituals to better inform library patrons who may wish to incorporate these works into their own performances.
Photo credit: Hal Gatewood via UnSplash