Tuesday of last week, August 4, marked one year in my role at Vanderbilt. The time has flown by! One of my goals for the summer was to reflect on my first year as a librarian and to plan for the second year based on what I’d learned. Although I haven’t had as much time for that reflection as I’d hoped, for my final post as a First-Year Academic Librarian blogger, I wanted to share a few lessons learned that I’m planning to build on during the upcoming year:
Be proactive
I started this job last year only three weeks before the first day of fall classes. Although it felt like enough of a head start at the time, especially considering that I had only moved to Nashville a few weeks prior, I wish that it had been possible for me to start earlier. As it was, there were several classes that I had to get ready to teach or co-teach at the last minute, relationships with the department I support that I was trying to build in a hurry, and a lot of basic information about how everything worked that I had to learn. Even with support from the other librarians at my library, plus our library director, it all felt like a whirlwind.
One example of something that I wish I could have planned better for was when I met individually with around 25 students from the same degree program, almost all in October, for research appointments. I realized about halfway through the appointments that the students all needed help with the same skills – choosing databases and learning how to search with Boolean terms – and that it would be a lot more efficient for everyone’s time if I could have taught all the students that in one instruction session. This year, I reached out to the appropriate professor in late July and asked if I could come to a class early in the semester to teach everyone the basics of a library search. Happily, she enthusiastically agreed. My hope is that this year, I’ll be able to spend my appointments with students talking about their specific search topics and make the sessions more tailored to their research interests. But that wouldn’t have even been a possibility if I hadn’t learned from last year and proactively reached out this year.
Build community
During this first year, one of the main things I knew was how much I didn’t know. I had tons of questions (and still do), and more things to learn seemed to come up every week. Luckily, librarians are generally helpful people, and I’ve gotten very lucky with how many people around me have been willing to help me out. My colleagues at my library, Peabody, have been incredible, always willing to answer questions and take the time to walk me through different processes and procedures. Additionally, there were actually six new librarians (including me) who started at Vanderbilt last summer, and we all bonded pretty quickly. Being able to check in with them, ask each other questions, and serve as sounding boards has been a huge help. We also started a journal club that’s expanded to include other newer librarians, and having that built-in community is great.
I’ve also been able to make and strengthen connections with librarians outside of Vanderbilt. One of my professors from library school is now friend and mentor – in addition to our frequent Zooms, we’re also co-authoring a textbook chapter. The education librarian from UNC-Chapel Hill, where I did my MSLS, has also become a friend and colleague. We support a lot of similar degree programs, so we chat around once a month about what trends we’re seeing with our students, what helpful resources we’ve found, what new ideas we’ve tried, and more. And, because I get so many business-related questions, I’ve also looked for business mentors who can help with questions. In addition to all the business librarians at Vanderbilt, who have been great, I’ve also connected with UNC-Chapel Hill’s business school librarian. Building all of these relationships and communities has taken time, but it’s been time so well spent. My first year would have been so much harder without my colleagues and friends, and now I have these solid connections to move forward with this year.
Learn lots!
When I first started, my library director told me that “this is a learning year.” I agreed, because of course that made sense on the surface, but at the time I didn’t fully understand what she was getting at. It took going through this first year for me to really understand what she meant. There’s so much more that I know now after a full academic cycle. Some of it is tangible – like being proactive – but a lot of it is also intangible. I know which months will likely be busy and which will be slow(er). I know how much fun it is when the students come back to campus after the quiet summer. I know that I need to work ahead on projects because every day is different, and saving something for a specific day probably means that that day will get overtaken by something else and I’ll have to scramble. I know that a big part of my job is just being present, both at my library and at my department, and getting involved with whatever’s happening. And even with everything that I’ve learned in the last year, I’m very conscious that there’s still so much I don’t know. There’s always something else to learn.
Looking ahead
Students will be back at Vanderbilt in about two weeks. I’ve already done some prep work for the upcoming semester and academic year, but I have a lot more to do before classes start. I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom and meeting with students more regularly, as well as reconnecting with colleagues who I haven’t seen as much over the summer. Vanderbilt Libraries also hosts regular professional development sessions for newer librarians during the school year, so I’m excited to see familiar faces at those sessions as well (plus, more learning!). I’m also just really interested to see how I feel about this second year compared to the first year. My hope is that I can learn just as much, while also building on what worked from last year. I’m looking forward to it!
Although I took one psycho-linguistics course in undergrad (very interesting, by the way), I never thought I would be able to apply the theories and examples I learned in that class to real-life. As I navigated my first-year of academic librarianship in a bilingual French-English institution, I slowly began to accumulate routines and activities that worked for me the most. With French being my third language, I wanted to take this post to share strategies and tips that helped me in my first year to improve my French more than it ever has.
Identifying Needs
Something that I found to be helpful is to organize my own personal needs in recognizing what skills I lacked the most. For me, they were conversational and oral skills, especially during bilingual meetings or when listening to presentations. Identifying a set of words that were commonly used within everyday work was something I quickly recognized that helped immensely in these everyday situations. In addition, really getting myself out there in terms of French training, lectures, workshops, events, conferences, symposiums and volunteering for co-teaching and shadowing opportunities were other ways to quickly be exposed to an immersed setting.
Confidence
Frenglish is definitely real. I use Konglish (Korean+English) quite often with my family, but I always thought that my French had to be perfect before I opened my mouth, especially in professional settings. If there is something I learned this year, it really is that trying is often enough! I often think about my parents when I think I speak broken French. When they first immigrated to Canada, they must have also felt this fear and wall in communication, accents, and judgement. Most people are simply just grateful that I am trying to speak and communicate, and often to help them! My favourite memory from a teaching session is a student coming up to me after and thanking me for learning French. These little fragments of memory and experiences really motivate me in wanting to learn and refine my skills further.
Building a Network
It is honestly 110% due to my amazing co-workers and supportive network that I continued to work hard on my French this year. From external French courses, to French courses through the university, conversation circles both within the university and at the public library, bi-weekly chats with co-workers, weekly lessons with a French tutor, group lessons, and much more were some ways I received help from my network. Making friends is definitely not something that comes natural to me, but when sharing the same struggles such as learning a new language together, it does become easier. Holding each other accountable and continuing to expand my network without any language barriers has been a challenging, yet rewarding process of this language acquiring journey.
Mélange into your Hobbies
As mentioned in a previous blog post here, one of my favourite ways to spend leisure time is to go out to cinemas and watch movies. Building a routine into incorporating French into my hobbies has been ideal as I find it to be a low-stress, yet beneficial use of my time (we love efficiency!). Things like the French cinema club, French film festivals, Québécois film festivals, purposely watching movies without subtitles, and trying to finish a French director’s filmography, are some fun ways I expanded learning into my time off. The different accents, countries, and cultures are only a snapshot, but the films provide stories and insight into atmospheres and environments that I found to be critical in understanding the language in a colonial, communal, historical, and different socioeconomical contexts.
Overall, I am quite pleased at how much my French has struggled and improved this past year. Having the confidence to teach in French was something unimaginable last summer but now I am happy to have taught 4 sessions in my third language. Of course, the learning never really stops, especially in librarianship, but I am looking forward to more that I will learn with this new lens of a third language.
Copyright competency is about more than knowing the rules. It’s about knowing what the rules are trying to achieve and how libraries contribute to those goals.
If you have a legally inclined librarian in your life, you may have heard them lament the state of copyright education in MLIS programs. If not, then allow me. Several studies have highlighted the widespread lack of sufficient copyright education across MLIS programs, both in North America and abroad (Cross & Edwards, 2011; Dryden, 2010; Fernández-Molina et al., 2022; Gathegi & Burke, 2008; Schmidt & English, 2015). These studies also point out that, even in the LIS programs that do offer some form of copyright-focused course, many are elective as opposed to a requirement for matriculation; few of the courses are “rigorous” or are regularly updated alongside the evolving copyright environment (Kawooya et al., 2019); and ultimately, “very few courses at the master’s level provide for the minimal requirements in terms of copyright literacy for professionals —whether to carry out their own tasks and functions, or else to aid co-workers or users as effectively as possible” (Fernández-Molina et al., 2022, p. 6). In a 2014 survey, only 49% of academic librarians felt prepared to provide copyright support to library patrons (Charbonneau & Priehs, 2014), and those librarians—along with library deans (Eye, 2013)—expressed a desire for additional copyright training. I’d guess the results would be similar in 2026. My MLIS program did offer a copyright-focused course and I still needed several copyright professional development courses to feel competent.
Copyright competency is about more than knowing and following (and often over-complying with) the rules. It’s about knowing why the rules exist—what goals the law is trying to accomplish so as to benefit society, and how the current legal framework is or is not helping society reach those goals. Libraries can locate their contributions to these larger societal goals and thereby understand why and how copyright law allows us to do what we do. And we can often do more than we might think (e.g. thank you, fair use).
On the other side of the coin, copyright law can also restrict libraries from being able to do what they should be able to do. Contractual override of library exceptions and fair use rights, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s restrictive amendments to library copyright exceptions (17 U.S. Code § 108 b(2) and c(2)), and the Second Circuit’s unfortunate decision in the Internet Archive case on controlled digital lending are just a few examples of a tightening belt on libraries and our mission of sharing information for the public good. Libraries (read: librarians) need to know how to make their own case. We contribute in unique ways to the societal goals copyright is trying to accomplish. Yet, in conversations with copyright experts, I’ve heard this sentiment shared several times: “If someone proposed the idea of libraries today, they’d be laughed out of the room.” I don’t think they’re wrong.
So, yes, we need to pay more attention to copyright in MLIS programs. We need ongoing professional development about copyright as it evolves. We need to feel more prepared to inform folks about how copyright affects their work (for example, authors’ propensity to sign away their journal article copyrights with abandon is the “original sin” of the serials crisis). Fortunately, there are very smart people and organizations working hard in this arena. I’m sharing a few of my favorite resources here, in hopes that they help someone take a step toward more copyright confidence:
Quick Reference Resources
All things from Authors Alliance: Super reliable advisors on all things copyright, specializing in issues affecting higher ed and in support of authors “who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly.” Along with their public-facing news, analysis, and updates about copyright, they also work directly with academic libraries, if you know of an interested dean.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OER: An explanation of how fair use allows authors to reference/include content/diagrams from other works in new noncommercial texts (even if those other works are all-rights-reserved). Generally helpful examples of how fair use can be applied to authorship
Fair Use Fundamentals from Fair Use Week: A tidy and LibGuide-friendly infographic on how fair use supports the fundamental purpose of copyright and makes possible lots of uses we rely on every day. Also, consider celebrating Fair Use Week in February!
Steps in the Analysis of a U.S. Copyright Case (Enriquez, 2013): Even though the risk of legal action and legal penalty is quite low for academic libraries, for those who want to understand all possible outcomes of their copyright-related actions, this document is a simple overview of court procedures for copyright infringement cases.
CopyrightX: Libraries: For those who want a law school dive into copyright, this is worth the time.
Creative Commons Certificate Curriculum: The ultimate authority on how CC licenses work. This certificate program is great, and in the spirit of open sharing, CC also makes their curriculum materials publicly available.
Open Copyright Education Advisory Network (OCEAN): OCEAN is carrying forth the mantel of regular copyright professional development for cultural heritage institutions. Not copyright 101, but if you have a baseline understanding, their events are great.
Over the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to attend two virtual library conferences – the 2026 Southeast Collaborative Conference, and the Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students 2026 Virtual Conference. I wanted to use my blog for this month to reflect on what I learned from both of these experiences.
Southeast Collaborative Conference
This conference happened first, over three days in the second week of March. I thought the pacing of the conference was helpful, as they included breaks in the schedule so attendees could check in on our day jobs without missing any of the content. Additionally, most of the sessions were pre-recorded, which allowed the speakers to be active in the chat throughout the presentation, answering questions and responding to comments. I thought that really helped to recreate how an in-person conference feels, and the emphasis on engagement made sessions fun. I also really appreciated that the conference made all of the slides and materials available to participants as soon as the conference ended. Knowing that I can reference them later, and see the materials from sessions I couldn’t attend, means that I really got the most I could out of the conference experience.
I was excited to see a presentation on Generative AI Literacy from two librarians that I know from my UNC-Chapel Hill grad school days, including one librarian whom I took a class with! I learned a lot from the presentation that I can incorporate into my own AI instruction and workshops (with attribution, of course). The presenters even shared that they’re going to be developing asynchronous tutorials for Generative AI in libraries that will be freely available to anyone, and let attendees know that all events about Generative AI at the University Libraries are open to anyone, not just university affiliates. I had no idea that I could still join any of the trainings that are offered online, and am looking forward to signing up for as many as I can attend.
Additionally, I thought the keynote was extremely powerful. It featured state librarians from five states – North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee. One of the only live presentations at this conference, these leaders spoke candidly and eloquently about the challenges facing all types of libraries and library systems today, and what they’re doing to meet them head-on. It was inspiring and made me glad all over again that I chose this career.
Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students
This conference was second, held over two afternoons in the third week of March. This conference took place over Zoom, in four-hour sessions each day with no breaks. The format was more challenging than the previous week’s, but still emphasized the importance of engagement between presenters and attendees. I was especially excited about this conference, because all of the programs I support are master’s and doctoral programs, and during this first year I’ve felt unsure at times of the best way to approach supporting these programs. I really hoped that I could learn some tips and tricks from the presenters.
Unsurprisingly, there were quite a few sessions about Generative AI at this conference as well. These presenters didn’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of how to get the most out of Gen AI the way the previous conference did, but I appreciated the contrast of this approach that focused more on platforms and how graduate students tend to engage with these tools. Between the two conferences, I was able to add a lot of different tools to my Gen AI toolbox.
Several presentations also focused on how to approach orientations and workshops for grad students differently than for undergrads. I present a lot of library orientation sessions, and librarians at my institution are currently being asked to make sure our workshop offerings are robust, so these sessions were especially relevant to me. I appreciated how presenters focused on acknowledging graduate students have unique needs and may be juggling additional responsibilities when compared to undergrads, so it’s important to make sure the library is giving them the tools and knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.
I do wish that the sessions had been a bit more focused on specific actions that attendees can take in their own libraries. It seemed like many presenters were focused on sharing their work and what was successful for them, but not as focused on how their successes could be adapted for other libraries. I would have liked to have a few more concrete programming ideas that I could take back to my own libraries. Perhaps that’s something that I could work on as a presentation of my own for a future iteration of this conference. I also wished that the conference had stretched an additional half hour to add a break in the middle. I think it would have helped with tiredness and staying on top of other work at the end of the day.
Overall Takeaways and Future Thoughts
Although I’ve been to several in-person conferences before, I had never participated in an online conference and wasn’t sure how the experience would translate. I love the feeling of walking into a conference and knowing that everyone is there to learn, meet fellow professionals and maybe make future friends, and get everything that we can out of the experience. I was worried that these conferences would be lacking in the camaraderie and excitement of an in-person setting. Although I didn’t get quite the same feeling as I do when I walk in the door of a convention center, I was really happy to find that both conferences were able to recreate similar vibes over online platforms.
It’s also important to recognize that online conferences lower a lot of barriers of participation for many people – including me! I’m lucky to be at an institution that strongly supports professional development, but even that support wouldn’t have been enough for me to travel to two conferences in subsequent weeks. Holding a conference online also means that the cost to participate is likely lower – or in the case of these two conferences, eliminated completely. I really appreciate both conferences’ commitment to access, affordability, and availability.
Overall, I had a great time and gained a lot from my participation in these conferences. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for registration to open next year – and maybe I’ll even submit a presentation proposal myself!
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 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.
