Retrospective: Research in a Pandemic

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Someone on Twitter asked, ‘What have you achieved this year that you’re proud of?’

DISCLAIMER (also posted on my Teaching Artist blog). It troubles me slightly that earlier in the pandemic, reading other people’s updates about all their achievements just made me feel guilty. All I was doing was working from home and keeping everyone safely looked after. Nothing heroic, nothing remarkable. I’ll be honest, my kneejerk reaction to such postings was a combination of, “come on, guys, do you have to?” and “well, I can’t be seen to be slacking here!” But the truth of the matter is that no-one fully knows other peoples’ situations – how much they’re struggling, whether they have caring responsibilities, or indeed, what their work-life balance is – whether they’ve chosen it or found it forced upon them.

Comparisons are Futile

I suppose the moral is that it’s pointless to try to compare oneself with other people. I’ve been in Glasgow nearly 33 years, still on the same grade, despite having gained a doctorate, a teaching certificate, and two fellowships. Written a book, published a lot, given plenty of research papers. Still – in terms of time allocation – more of a librarian than a postdoc researcher.

“You’re a bloody librarian, woman!”

I was once told, “You’re a bloody librarian, woman!” In the west of Scotland, the “I kennt your faither” philosophy – not allowing someone to forget their place or where they came from – is still alive and well, and if I’m on the same grade, I’m forced to conclude that my value has not increased. It’s very depressing.

Failed in the Eyes of One who Climbs Ladders

A former colleague once said that if one wasn’t moving jobs and climbing the ladder, then one was a failure. This philosophy favours men and people without children. I do admire people with ambition. I also admire and envy people who are less ambitious, but who are content with where they’re at. As for me, I’m still struggling with thwarted ambition, three and a half years before retirement! I should very much like to have moved jobs and climbed the ladder – anyone who thinks I’m unambitious, really doesn’t know me. However, I’ve raised three sons (who have benefited enormously from the Scottish education system, which is why we didn’t want to leave Scotland!) and I got those extra qualifications whilst working full-time. (Apart from statutory maternity leaves, I’ve always worked full-time.) If I’m a failure for not getting promoted – guilty as charged – then I do have a few good excuses. And I did recently get a Special Note of Commendation from my CILIP researcher colleagues, which was heartening.

Coast Downhill? No Way!

During the Covid pandemic, I’ve pushed myself to achieve as much as I could, because I didn’t want to find myself sliding towards an unwanted, age-related slowing down. I am not yet of retirement age, and I can’t bear to think that inactivity might see me slipping out of the research scene before I’m ready. So this is posted in the spirit of demonstrating that I’m still here, still research-active, and not yet ready to be written off!

So here goes!

Not everything is a ‘research output’, obviously. I stitched my lockdown journal, for a start. (I even made a video about it.) I learned the concertina, and I wrote tunes for it.

I broke my foot, baked banana bread, put on weight, and once my foot was better, I put myself on a diet and exercise regime to lose some pounds. I’ve made gallons of soup, and done 95% of the housework. (Two of the three of us are over sixty – and two are oblivious to housework or the absence of our weekly cleaner!)

But in terms of research? Working from home since March, I’ve benefited from a mostly peaceful dining room (albeit a thoroughfare to the kitchen), and gained my commuting time along with the new responsibility of cooking most weekday meals. The allocation of my time to library (70%) and research (30%) is unchanged. I’ve done my user education and made several training videos in my library role, and I love this side of it. But I fight a compulsion to answer library emails at any time of the day or night (even the day after Boxing Day) for fear of being considered unhelpful if I don’t – whilst research would swallow me up whole, without any resistance from me, if I didn’t occasionally get dragged away from it! I freely admit that I have absolutely NOT limited my research activities to ten hours a week. It makes me excellent value, but I’m reaching the point where I feel I cannot try much harder, and it won’t really make any difference to my career trajectory. If one can have a flat trajectory in the first place!

Quite apart from wanting to achieve “outputs”, I have tried to take the attititude that it is easier to attend a Zoom conference than to arrange for everything to run smoothly in my absence attending a “real” live event in a diffferent city.

So, how have I done this very weird year? I am not dissatisfied.

PUBLICATIONS

  • ‘The Cinderella of Stationers’ Hall: music (and metadata) in Georgian legal deposit libraries’ Catalogue and Index 201 (Dec 2020)
  • ‘A Music Library for St Andrews: use of the University’s Copyright Music Collections, 1801-1849’, in Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society no.15 (2020), pp.13-33. 
  • Romantic National Song Network blogpost, 9 Sept 2020, ‘Revisiting the Achievements of Song-Collector Alexander Campbell’
  • ‘The sound of forgotten music: Karen McAulay uncovers some of the great female composers who have been lost from history’. The People’s Friend, Special Edition, 11 Sep 2020, 2 p. Dundee : D C Thomson.
  • ‘Performative Silence in the Library’, Icepops Annual 2020: International Copyright Literacy Event with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars, ed. Chris Morrison and Jane Secker, p. 32-33
  • ‘Library support to students on blended-learning courses: some thoughts on best practice’ (SCONUL Focus 71, February 2020) https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Karen%20McAulay%20FOCUS%2071.pdf
  • Guest co-editor (and contributor) of Brio vol.56 no.2 (Winter 2019), dedicated to Claimed From Stationers Hall network-related writings.

PRESENTATIONS (whatever would we have done without Zoom and Teams?!)

  • University of Glasgow Scottish and Celtic Studies Department, ‘Alexander Campbell’s song-collecting for Albyn’s Anthology’ (17 November)
  • Traditional Song Forum, ‘Scottish song-collector Alexander Campbell and his ethnomusicological exploits’
  • EFDSS Conference, London, ‘All the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order’: musical resemblances over the border.’
  • CILIP Metadata Group Conference, ‘The Cinderella of Stationers’ Hall: Music (and Metadata) in Georgian Legal Deposit Libraries’

I’ve also facilitated an event for the Friends of Wighton, made a mini video presentation about my research for a Scottish research event …

… and made the aforementioned video about my stitched lockdown journal. I’ve done quite a few training videos with my library hat on, too, but I’ll spare you the details of those!

One Tune, One Little Tune!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

So here’s a fine state of affairs. I’m working on a book chapter. I’m also polishing a paper for a lecture I’m giving next month. There I was the other day, looking at one of the sources that I’m focusing on for the chapter, and suddenly – hey, THERE was a tune that had also been used by the anthology compiler that I’m lecturing on.

One thing led to another. I now have a new section in the lecture, a new selfie-stick for recording myself PLAYING the tune in various different iterations, a practising schedule to make sure the tunes sound good in the recording, and the distinct possibility that I shall write something more extended for this blog at some stage. Which is great, of course.

However, that aside, these particular points of interest are neither connected with the impending book chapter, nor my own research into Scottish music publishers! I’m stuck with an earworm. Meanwhile, I need to set the lecture aside for now, and put some more work into the chapter …

Spread Too Thin?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This is another of my cross-posts from the Facebook Glasgow Music Publishers page. But I’ve updated the update!

Apologies for the silence here. In recent weeks, I’ve given two conference papers (one on Stationers’ Hall music, and one on old Scots songs and a Lowland pipe tune); I gave another talk (about Scottish song-collector Alexander Campbell) last Sunday late afternoon. Was I happy with my talk? Yes, until I had given it! This self-doubt is really quite a handicap.

I have just had the luxury of a long weekend, but – well, it hasn’t been luxurious. As well as the Sunday talk, there was the usual domesticity and the church organist duties. We expected the roofer to start work today, too, but it rained – and you don’t remove a VERY large skylight in the rain! Not to worry – I turned one of my conference papers into a journal article and submitted it this evening. I’ve just realised I’m a coward. I submitted an article to a journal I’ve not submitted to before, and now I’m struggling NOT to judge it too harshly, probably before the editor has even checked their email inbox!

I really do have to get back to work on a book chapter – although neither it nor the rest of this frenetic activity has been about Glasgow music publishers! (I just hope their ghosts aren’t feeling neglected, or heaven help me come Hallowe’en!)

A question to you, my reader

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I asked a question on my Facebook page, Glasgow Music Publishers 1880-1950. Maybe folk don’t realize I genuinely would like to hear their thoughts! Here it is again, for anyone who doesn’t use Facebook:-

So, now. Has any particular topic really resonated with you, or has there been anything you wish I’d expand upon? I have the opportunity to write a longer piece (not immediately, but in the foreseeable future) and I’m trying to decide what to focus on!

(Confession – the image is of cards by Dundee printers, Valentines. I missed out on the eBay auction, but snaffled the picture earlier …)“

Book History: Scottish Airs in London Dress

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Before establishing the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network, I was a postdoctoral researcher on the Bass Culture project, which looked at Scottish fiddle tune collections largely from the Georgian era.  In that context, I read a paper at Musica Scotica in Spring 2014, about a couple of London-published music collections.  It has finally been published in Scottish Music Review Vol.5 (2019), 75-87, this week.

Sometimes when we look back at earlier work, we wonder if we’d have written it differently today, but I’m still pretty happy with this article.  If anything, I think it justifies my claim that the history of this kind of collection does indeed deserve to count as “book history”, even if it is music rather than literature. So, here it is for your enjoyment:-

Scottish Airs in London Dress: Vocal Airs and Dance Tunes in Two Eighteenth-Century London Collections

Guest Issue of Brio (IAML UK & Ireland) guidelines for contributors

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Woohoo! It’s deadline time.  As you know, we’re contributing a special issue of Brio for IAML (UK and Ireland) on the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall theme.  We agreed to have all writings completed by the end of August, and contributors up and down the UK and Ireland have been – and are – eagerly scribbling their considered thoughts on different aspects of the topic.

Brio does have a very general set of guidelines for contributors, but when it comes to referencing, the main requirement is to be clear and consistent within each article.  Here’s a pdf of the guidelines, along with a quick screenshot of the first footnotes in the article on Edinburgh University Library’s music collections, already contributed by Alasdair Macdonald and Elizabeth Quarmby-Lawrence, Vol.55 no.2  (‘From General Reid to DCRM(M): Cataloguing the music collections of Edinburgh University Library, Part 1, The early Reid Professors and the first catalogues, 1807-1941)’, 27-49.

If the pdf doesn’t open for you, please let me know!

If you’re reading this but you’re not (yet) a member of IAML, then you might like to know more about us.

The Dead Mouse

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’ve typed so much, and moved so much text around – not to mention manipulating images on the PowerPoint – that my mouse has died.

Yes, it has been another working weekend – I’ve edited and resubmitted a librarianship article to a librarianship journal, licked my seminar paper about Sir John Macgregor Murray into its final, polished shape, and totally indulged myself sourcing suitable images for the PowerPoint!   No kidding – I have had to abandon the mouse, which I’ve left twitching at the back of my desk.  It has had a long and interesting life.

I do have a day-trip planned for this week, to the archives of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland.  I’m off to inspect more Macgregor Murray documents – I can’t NOT see them!  It has been an interesting assignment, because I’ve found out so much more about him than I knew at the time of writing my PhD.

And then … back to grant-writing.  And thoughts of Stationers’ Hall music, amongst other things!