In The Disciplines

Mic Drop: Belonging, Mentorship, and Professional Culture at the Music Library Association

When I attended my first conference hosted by the Music Library Association (MLA) in Salt Lake City, UT this year, I expected to learn about music collections, cataloging standards, and emerging research resources.

I did learn those things. But what surprised me most—and became the central lesson of my experience—was the way the community’s professional culture fundamentally shaped a sense of belonging and opportunity through mentorship and openness.

The conference became a model for how professional gatherings can foster mentorship, generosity, and true inclusion. For a newcomer like me, this was transformative, demonstrating that professional culture defines not just what we learn, but how we join the field.

I arrived at the conference at a moment of professional transition. I had recently begun a new role as Humanities Librarian at the University of Chicago Library, serving as liaison to the Music Department and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. The position carries a particular sense of responsibility: it has been vacant for more than six years following the sudden and tragic passing of my predecessor.

While I come to this work with a background in performing arts and librarianship, I do not hold a PhD in music or a formal degree in the discipline. In a research environment like the University of Chicago—an institution known for intellectual rigor and strong disciplinary traditions—that reality can feel especially visible.

Without a dedicated internal mentor in music librarianship, I rely on the field’s insight for questions about publishing ecosystems, vendors, cataloging, and collection strategies, despite supportive supervision.

Conference in a single hotel with multiple maps, an app, Slack channel, and the MLA website with message board.

Entering a Specialized Field

At the same time, I am still learning to navigate the institution’s culture. The University of Chicago has long been associated with intellectual intensity, but also with a certain institutional privacy—an academic environment that can feel somewhat mysterious from the outside. Until quite recently, that culture was manifested literally: the university gates were locked, and visitors to the library needed special permission to enter. While those policies have evolved, the image remains a powerful metaphor for how knowledge institutions sometimes operate—carefully guarded, selective, and structured by invisible boundaries.

Entering music librarianship at the University of Chicago, with its infamous institutional boundaries, has made access, mentorship, and the feeling of community more than just professional benefits—they are essential. Attending the MLA conference thus became a pivotal way to encounter this culture directly.

Although conferences often promote networking and mentorship, those interactions are frequently shaped by hierarchy and credentials in practice.

What I encountered at MLA felt strikingly different.

The conference was intentionally designed for participation—large enough for expertise, but small enough for repeated encounters. All events were held at a single hotel, allowing conversations to flow freely.

Before the conference even began, first-time attendees were invited to a pre-conference Zoom orientation that introduced the organization and explained what the conference experience would look like. Programming was shared well in advance via the CVent platform, making it easy to explore sessions and plan a schedule in advance. Many sessions were also available to stream, supported by a technical team that ensured clear audio and video, as well as recorded access.

As an attendee at the ACRL Conference in 2026, I noticed the conference organizers aimed for similar intentionality in welcoming newcomers. However, in my experience, ACRL felt overwhelming and panel and program acceptance were extremely competitive–less than 10% of submissions were accepted. The biannual structure increased the pressure and made networking challenging, despite the welcoming atmosphere. Even after volunteering on several committees, I found it difficult to build connections and advocate for myself in such a large, bureaucratic organization. Unlike the targeted mentorship I experienced at MLA, ACRL’s size and structure made formal mentoring difficult.

Even the scheduling reflected thoughtful design. Interest group and committee meetings were held the week after the conference, so attendees would not have to choose between participating in the organization and attending sessions.

These structural choices were more than logistical: by reducing barriers and prioritizing access, the conference created a setting where real community, collaboration, and learning could happen—illustrating the central role culture plays in professional belonging.

A Conference Designed for Participation

Professional networking can be difficult, even after years in academic libraries. Finding the right balance between introducing oneself and participating, while respecting others’ boundaries, takes care. Mentorship remains professional labor.

Because of this, I was especially grateful to connect with potential mentors before the conference even began. Through introductions from fellow librarian Greg MacAyeal, I had the opportunity to speak with several MLA members beforehand. By the time I arrived at the conference, there were already familiar faces in the room.

That small shift made a tremendous difference. What might have been an intimidating professional gathering instead felt relational and welcoming from the beginning.

Music librarianship is an extraordinarily specialized field. It requires familiarity with music publishing ecosystems, performance traditions, archival preservation, metadata standards, and constantly evolving formats.

Yet the expertise present at the conference did not feel guarded.

It was shared.

Sessions ranged from discussions of contemporary score distribution to cataloging documentation and collaborative strategies for collection development in an era of budget constraints. Librarians, composers, and distributors discussed how new technologies are reshaping the circulation of music.

Rather than presenting polished solutions, many sessions invited collective problem-solving. Librarians spoke candidly about institutional constraints—budgets, workflows, and evolving research needs—and the conversations continued outside the formal sessions.

Slides from the presentation “ADA Title II and Music Libraries: Implications, Questions, and Strategies”, Kristi Bergland, Jackie Zook, and Anna Dimoula.

Scholarship, Performance, and Community

The cumulative effect was a sense of shared responsibility, not competition—a model of professional culture grounded in collective advancement, which sharply contrasts with other associations.

One evening event captured that spirit particularly well: Salon Night.

The program featured an eclectic mix of scholarship and performance. There were operatic performances and a playful musical adaptation of Oklahoma! titled Obsolescence, which was hilarious and resonated with our beautiful nerdy hearts. A presentation on queer disco clubs in 1970s New York examined dance floors as spaces of cultural memory and community formation.

Kathleen (Kathy) Abromeit, Head of the Conservatory Library with Oberlin College Libraries, shared work from her new book An Index to Spirituals, , reflecting on how a single reference question in the 1990s grew into decades of scholarly documentation of African American spirituals as both musical and cultural history.

What stood out was not just the diversity of topics but the way people engaged with them.

The room moved easily between laughter, curiosity, and deep reflection—at moments people laughed loudly, and at others they wiped away tears. People spoke about archives, music, and cultural memory with a level of care that extended beyond professional obligation.

Spaces that blend rigorous inquiry with genuine openness were rare in my experience before this conference. It illustrated that professional cultures built around mentorship and inclusivity can redefine how newcomers join, contribute, and thrive.

Confronting the Field’s History

The conference also made space for conversations that confronted the field’s historical foundations. In a presentation on early twentieth-century music librarianship, Veronica A. Wells examined how collection practices helped codify the Western canon in American libraries and ongoing questions regarding designation of “popular” music and the deeply racist, classicist cultural assumptions held by founding librarians.

Those decisions continue to shape music collections today, underscoring how professional cultures can reinforce or challenge exclusion—making intentionality in mentorship and inclusion all the more crucial.

Listening to that presentation, I found myself thinking about Audre Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Lorde reminds us that institutions can claim progressive intentions while still reproducing the structures they inherit.

Music libraries—like many cultural institutions—carry those histories.

The conference also included a panel titled “Furthering Contemporary Indigenous Representation and Inclusion in Collections and Programming: Library and Archive Perspectives,” featuring Jeanette Harrison, Allison McClanahan, Erin Fehr, Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk, Delbert Anderson, and Laurie Arnold.

The discussion explored how Indigenous musicians, composers, and archivists are reshaping libraries’ approaches to collections, programming, and performance archives. Speakers reflected on the complex musical histories shaped by the U.S. boarding school system, where Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their communities and subjected to assimilationist policies. Within and despite these institutions, students encountered new musical forms and instruments that later influenced emerging musical traditions, including early jazz.

The panel emphasized that these histories must be understood not as products of the institutions themselves, but as examples of Indigenous resilience, adaptation, and cultural continuity. It also underscored the importance of centering Indigenous voices in archival interpretation and programming, ensuring that contemporary collections and performances reflect the perspectives of the communities whose histories they document.

A Profession Built on Conversation

Part of what makes this kind of conversation possible may lie in the nature of the field itself.

Music librarianship is often described as specialized, but in practice, it resists neat disciplinary boundaries. Music moves across formats and cultural contexts—scores, recordings, dance traditions, film, archives, and the ephemeral materials that surround performance.

A question about a score can quickly become a question about performance practice, cultural history, copyright law, or digital preservation.

Supporting this work requires collaboration with performers, composers, archivists, scholars, technologists, and community historians.

In that sense, music librarianship cannot easily operate in silos. The work itself demands conversation.

And perhaps that necessity helps cultivate the intellectual generosity I witnessed throughout the conference.

Carrying the Lessons Forward

Returning to my work at the University of Chicago Library, I have been thinking about what made this experience so meaningful.

Part of it was structural: thoughtful conference design, accessible programming, and mentorship opportunities for first-time attendees.

But much of it was cultural.

The MLA community demonstrated that professional expertise need not be guarded to be respected, and that intellectual rigor can coexist with generosity and care. In a profession often shaped by institutional prestige and credentialed authority, that culture felt quietly radical.

For someone entering a specialized field without a traditional disciplinary pathway—and inheriting a role that has been absent for years—that kind of professional community is not simply helpful.

It is essential.

And in many ways, the message that stayed with me from the conference came down to a single moment.

At the opening session, incoming MLA president Holling Smith-Borne, director of the Wilson Music Library at Vanderbilt University, reflected on their first experience attending an MLA meeting. They shared that when they first attended the conference, they quietly asked themselves, “Should I bring my full self to this space?” Do I belong here?

But they described choosing something different—to challenge that voice of doubt and replace it with another: No. You belong here. No matter who you are.

Listening to that story, I realized that what I had experienced throughout the conference—the mentorship, the intellectual generosity, and the willingness to share expertise—was not accidental.

It was a community intentionally working to make that statement true.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the colleagues who welcomed me into the Music Library Association community with generosity and care. Special thanks to Becca Fülöp, Amanda Dubose, Allison McClanahan, Bruce Evans, Ruthann McTyre, Tamar Barzel, Michelle Rivera, Misti Shaw, Sarah Ward, and Greg MacAyeal for mentorship, conversation, and encouragement throughout the conference.

Across Divides: Librarian as Translator

Editor’s Note: We welcome Jennifer Jarson to the ACRLog team. Jennifer is the Information Literacy and Assessment Librarian and Social Sciences Subject Specialist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her research interests include information literacy and student learning pedagogy and assessment, as well as issues regarding communication, collaboration, and leadership.

A few weeks ago, I facilitated a few discussion sessions with faculty at my institution who had participated in a recent information literacy study. Together, we reviewed and interpreted some of the more significant themes of the study’s findings. We discussed, for example, evidence of students’ competencies and sites of their struggles, our teaching and learning goals and the gaps between our goals and our realities, and so on. As we identified areas of students’ disconnects, some faculty began to identify a disconnect of their own. We need help, they said, to better understand conventions and ways of knowing outside our own disciplines. We recognize that disciplines view and value source types differently, for example, or cite differently, but we don’t know how and why. As the discussion continued, faculty described wanting to better understand the perspectives that students from different disciplinary backgrounds are bringing to their classes. In core courses within their departments, faculty described comfort with their own disciplinary traditions, of course, traditions in which their students are becoming knowledgeable or are already well-versed. Yet, in the increasingly interdisciplinary areas of our evolving liberal arts curriculum — first year seminars and cluster courses, to name a few — faculty described feeling a little more at sea. So deeply steeped in their own disciplinary traditions, they asked for a little help interpreting other disciplines’ points of view and the varying research approaches through which students might be passing on the way to their classes.

This request — for librarian to operate as translator — is not unfamiliar territory. We librarians frequently work as translators, as interpreters. In fact, it seems rather like our home turf. Facility with different ways of knowing and organization is our wheelhouse. Decoding those schema and perspectives for our different user groups is a language in which we’re fluent. We interpret our users’ needs when we engage in a reference interview. We translate their needs into search strategies to best fit database structures or into relevant subject headings in a catalog. We interpret for students an assignment’s purpose or their professors’ expectations. We interpret for faculty points of research/information literacy confusion and difficulty commonly experienced by students. We decipher for users the elements of citations and clarify their means of access. The librarian-as-interpreter (or perhaps we should say negotiator?) paradigm holds in navigating relationships between faculty and student, faculty and faculty, discipline and discipline, and information resource and user. It’s in my sphere of public services that I’ve given this topic most thought, but the librarian-as-translator trope doesn’t end there. The parallel surely continues in cataloging, systems, web design, and beyond.

So what is it about librarians that situates us in this role? And serves us well in it? It’s the nature of our work itself, no doubt. By working with our users, we see through their eyes. It’s the philosophies and values at our profession’s core (Ranganathan, anyone?), however debated our philosophies might be. With deep respect for our users and our resources alike, we aim to bridge the gaps between them. It’s the nature of our location, at the intersections of so many points in our information ecologies and our campus landscapes.

Access to these points — these viewpoints, these skill sets — is not something to take lightly or ignore. Our unique position affords us opportunities to reach across divides of perspectives, stakeholders, and disciplines. At the same time, we must take care to evaluate our neutrality in such a position; we must recognize the role we play and our responsibilities in these acts of translation. With an ear tuned accordingly, we can bring a diversity of voices to our varied campus tables.

What are you hearing? For whom and how are you interpreting? I would love to discuss your thoughts in the comments…

Evaluating Research By the Numbers

This month’s post in our series of guest academic librarian bloggers is by Bonnie Swoger, Science and Technology Librarian at the State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo. She blogs at The Undergraduate Science Librarian.

Last week I taught an information literacy class to a group of senior Chemistry students. We didn’t talk about databases or indexes, we talked about numbers. We talked about impact factors and h-indexes and alternative metrics, and the students loved it. Librarians have used these metrics for years in collection development, and have looked them up to help faculty with tenure and promotion packets. But many librarians don’t know where the numbers come from, or what some of the criticisms are.

The students in this class needed to select a research topic, and the professor was tired of reading about obscure and “uninteresting” topics. He wanted his students to be able to find out what’s “hot” right now in chemical research.

At this level, the students are just starting to develop a sense about the nature of chemical research. It is hard for them to look at a journal article and know if that item is “hot” (or not). Librarians are often in the same boat. But there are some strategies for helping non-specialists do this. One is to look at science news sites such as C&E News, and the news wings of Science and Nature.

Another strategy is to make use of the metrics used to quantitatively assess journals, authors and articles.

We started the class by talking about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) developed by Eugene Garfield and Irving Sher almost 50 years ago (see this article for the history of the JIF). It is a simple calculation:

JIF = Number of Citations/Number of articles

I had asked the students to read a brief commentary prior to class discussing the use (and abuse) of this metric, and in class we discussed some of criticisms of the number:

The numerator and denominator count different things (commentary articles are included in the numerator but not the denominator, so a journal can get an extra boost if commentary-type articles are cited)
The publication of review articles can quickly increase the impact factor because they are more likely to be cited.

These students were particularly interested in how the JIF could be manipulated and intrigued to learn about the story of how a single article increased the impact factor of Acta Crystallographia – Section A from 2 to 50 in a single year.

Importantly, we talked about how the impact factor was never meant to assess individual articles or authors.

So we explored alternatives.

The h-index was first suggested by physicist Jorge Hirsch, and and is now sometimes used to assess the influence of particular authors.

It works like this: Let’s say that professor Jane Smith has published 5 articles. Each article has been cited a different number of times:

Article	Citations
Article 1	9
Article 2	10
Article 3	4
Article 4	2
Article 5	1

The h-index is the number that fills in the phrase “x number of articles have been cited x number of times.” In this case, we can easily say that 3 of Jane’s papers have been cited at least 3 times, so she has an h-index of 3. The major citation indexes (Scopus, Web of Knowledge) can calculate this number easily.

Like all other measures, h-index isn’t perfect. It never decreases, even as a researcher’s influence in their field decreases. It favors fields that tend to have larger numbers of authors on each paper (like high energy physics), and it can easily be manipulated by citing your own papers (or those of your friends and relatives). It does provide a way to try to sort out those authors who just write a lot from those authors who write a lot of good stuff.

We then turned to a brief discussion about some of the alternative metrics now being proposed by various journals and publishers. Some of the simplest measures in this category are the number of on-site views of an article and the number of times a PDF has been downloaded. Other tools include article ratings, comments, and how many times an article has been bookmarked. I think these developments are exciting, and it will be interesting to see how scholars react as more publishers offer these services.

Of course, none of these numbers are useful without context. Is an impact factor of 12 in organic chemistry considered good or bad? What about an h-index of 7 for a cancer researcher? And when an article is downloaded 457 times, what does that actually mean?

At the end of the class, I gave students an article citation and asked to students to determine if the research topic (and the article) was “hot” or not. They were asked to find some of the relevant metrics, and asked to provide a bit of background to give some context to their numbers. They had fun exploring the numbers, and I think they felt more confident in their ability to determine how important or buzz-worthy their prospective research topics might be as a result of our in-class discussion.

The numbers without context aren’t very helpful. But if you can find the numbers, and gain a sense of context, they can help non-specialists gain a sense of perspective about particular journals, authors and articles.

Faculty Blog Round Up: Teaching with Technology

Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago we put out a call for someone to be our new faculty blog correspondent. With this post I’d like to introduce Laura Wimberley, the librarian we’ve selected to keep us up-to-date on what’s happening in the faculty blogosphere. Laura works at the Medical Center Library at the University of California San Diego. In addition to her MLIS – which she just completed – she also has an MA and PhD in Political Science. Her research interests include information policy, scholarly communication, and collection development. In addition to her posts here, you can read her at Libri & Libertas. We look forward to Laura’s future posts.

Much of what’s going on with faculty is very similar to what’s going on with librarians: Conferences are great, highly specialized, but exhausting! Or: Why, oh why, do students not cite sources after we work so hard with them? These experiences, we know.

What we don’t usually observe is the teaching, and this is one of the parts we need to stay in tune with. Here I’ve highlighted three posts with really innovative technology teaching techniques – ideas that you might not have thought about how to support from the library. Or maybe you’re dying to include blogging, Wikipedia, and gaming, and you didn’t know how to find faculty who are doing it, too. Either way, here’s a sample.

Acephalous is the blog of Scott Eric Kaufman, who teaches English at the University of California Irvine; he also contributes to the faculty group blogs The Valve (mostly literature) and Edge of the American West (mostly history).

SEK is blogging with his students in his undergraduate writing course the Rhetoric of Heroism. Because the course relies so heavily on detailed analysis of film and other visual iconography, a blog with embedded images seems like a wonderful way to communicate the material. I expect they’re watching and discussing the films together in class, but images are usually not the kind of thing students are accustomed to taking notes on (especially in the dark).

Jeremy Boggs, who blogs at ClioWeb, is a graduate student in American history at George Mason University. He’s also creative lead at the Center for History and New Media, so it’s not too surprising that he’s willing to take on the bete noire – Wikipedia. In his undergraduate American History Survey course, he assigns students to not just use, but create, Wikipedia articles, including citating sources, monitoring for follow-up collaboration, and writing a reflective essay. One of his students wrote the article that developed into the entry for Living Newspapers.

Another history professor, Rob MacDougall of the University of Western Ontario, blogs at Old is the New New (with a charming original steampunk blog theme). Rob uses the game Civilization to frame the course Science, Technology, and Global History. He asks his students to write an essay that reconceptualizes technology not as a serial, linear progress of development – as the game depicts it – but in some other way. How could we play a game that thinks of history as more contingent or branching or cyclic?

In this assignment, the game is laying bare a lot of social assumptions we carry around without realizing, and making them something students can analyze. If you ever need to justify a games collection in your library, this kind of work is a stellar example of such a collection could do.

Why are You a Librarian?

No, that isn’t meant to be said in the voice of a slightly-tipsy relative at a family gathering. You? A librarian? Why on earth . . .

It’s an invitation to a meme started over at Free Exchange on Campus, where I occasionally blog. It was inspired by Dr. Crazy’s wonderful post, “Why I Teach Literature.” And now a number of academic bloggers have weighed in. What they have to say is an excellent way to learn more about faculty perspectives and the passion that drives them into the classroom.

I was asked to join in just as I was mulling over Steven’s post on faculty status, so in part my response to “why I am a librarian” is an extension of my responses to that post and a reflection on the ACRL/AAUP statement on librarians and faculty status. In my post I tagged a handful of librarians – you’re it! – but then felt a bit silly because in those blogs, the answer is pretty obvious, even if it the question isn’t posed that way.

But I hope some librarians will be moved to pick up the meme – here in comments, or on your own blogs. I sometimes think some of our colleagues in the academy respect what we do … they just aren’t exactly sure what it is or why it matters.