Dr Karen McAulay explores the history of Scottish music collecting, publishing and national identity from the 18th to 20th centuries. Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, author of two Routledge monographs.
Click here for online poster & more about the speaker!
Don’t worry, it’ll all be in my book, currently at the publishers…
After diligently doing my organ practice this morning, I felt like an outing this afternoon. Only a librarian/musicologist would decide to go library-visiting! However, I knew that Paisley has a new, exciting public library building in the High Street, and I also wanted to find out about an old Paisley publication, so where else would I go? The image above is one I found on Renfrewshire Libraries’ website.
The library is bright and modern, on three floors. The ground floor has a large children’s section at the back of the floor, with places for parents and children to sit, and steps the children could go up and down – very cheerful and user-friendly.
There are also facilities for making a hot drink. Whatever next?! Very nice, but an unexpected surprise for an old-school librarian who last worked in a public library, erm, 36 years ago!
Plainly there wasn’t going to be anything of the kind I was looking for, on the ground floor. I headed up to the next floor, and the next. Places for computer use, an array of different seating arrangements, non-fiction …..
I asked, but I discovered that if I would find what I wanted anywhere in Paisley, then it was not here. I need to go the Heritage Centre (aka “the archives”), elsewhere in the city. That’s a trip for another day, since it’s not open at the weekend.
All was not lost. I also wanted to find out where Parlane’s offices had been. I knew that they, too, were in the High Street – and they were two doors away, in fact. They looked a bit sorry for themselves. I took a photo, but a string of twinkly lights (not illuminated by day) obscured a decent photo of the book sculpture at the top of the building.
Maybe I’ll find a better one online somewhere. Messrs Parlane might have been pleased to find a new library as their next-door-but-one neighbour, but I fear they would have been sad to see the High Street today. It wasn’t exactly bustling on a Saturday mid-afternoon.
Home I came, and spent several hours making lists of things I’d like to see at the Heritage Centre. (I hope they’re as welcoming as the website suggests, or they’ll find me a bit of a nuisance with my long list!!)
Preparing for my Good Morning Scotland interview the other day, as I mentioned, I drew up something halfway between a mind-map and a spreadsheet to clarify in my mind how old the songs were, and who they were associated with. I had also – ever the librarian – looked up which of the Whittaker Library songbooks actually contained the songs in question. I wasn’t looking for every copy we had, just a rough overview. I thought you might be interested to see what our library patrons have access to.
It is significant that there are only two genuinely old songs – the last two, by Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Otherwise, they’re popular songs that are Scottish, but folksongs? Not exactly traditional or old, but certainly much beloved today. So, will there still be popular songs in fifty years’ time? Yes, of course – but maybe they haven’t even been written yet!
Here is the list – in order of popularity – that Visit Scotland compiled from their recent survey:-
This is a YouTube link to Karine Polwart’s, ‘My heart’s in the Highlands.
In the closing pages of my second monograph (currently at the publishers, pending approval of the revisions and then copy-editing), I comment on the changing approaches to folk music in the late 1950s and 60s. So, when a colleague presented me with a pile of music which used to be in the library, but needed recataloguing (don’t ask!), my immediate reaction to this book was, ‘Aha, see, I was right. Look how different this is to Mozart Allan, James Kerr’s and Bayley & Ferguson’s folk song collections!’
As a scholar, I smiled with satisfaction as I noted that even the COVER of Folk Sing: A Handbook for Pickers and Singers was more modern – huge white letters on a half-black, half-red background. As for ‘pickers and singers’: well, we didn’t have ‘pickers’ in any of the dozens of Scottish publications that I’ve been writing about! Guitar/accordion chords as an addition, assuredly, but not usually melody, chords and no keyboard line. And as for the term, ‘pickers’? No. A more savvy friend informs me that the book came at the end of the skiffle revival, which according to Oxford Music Online was particularly strong in the UK:-
“While the skiffle revival of the 1950s embraced the USA and Germany, it gained most ground in Great Britain. […] Donegan and his imitators enjoyed considerable popularity until about 1959, when skiffle gave way, both in the USA and Europe, to ‘beat’ music and to rock and roll.”
Oxford Music Online (2001). Skiffle. Grove Music Online. Retrieved 19 Jan. 2024, from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000025930.
This song book was published in New York by Hollis Music in 1959, but distributed by Essex Music (4 Denmark Street) in London, and this particular copy was actually sold from a shop in Aberdeen. Notwithstanding this, it mainly contains American repertoire with just a few British songs and a single French one for good measure.
I examined it inside-out and backwards, observing contentedly that they indicated the names of the composer/arranger/lyricist above each song, along with which publishers owned the original copyright.
Then I sighed. This morning I had noted with pleasure that already this month, I’ve submitted a revised manuscript for my book, written a librarianship-ish article and two musicology abstracts, done a peer-review and a radio interview, with a research talk coming up to round off the month. That was my research-self.
But what I was supposed to be doing now, was cataloguing this anthology, not studying it.
The librarian part of me spent half this afternoon re-cataloguing it and copy-typing 150+ song titles from the contents list. It’s certainly useful – it means people will be able to find the songs – but it’s not nearly as rewarding!
Folk Sing: a Handbook for Pickers and Singers, containing traditional and contemporary folk songs / edited by Herbert Haufrecht (New York: Hollis Music; London: Essex Music, 1959)
Do note and admire the contents lists!
Yesterday was a bit unusual. I gave a talk about research using library resources – nothing unusual there. Then I sorted out arrangements for the Exchange Talk I’m giving online from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on 29th January. It’s all about how new educational and technological innovations affected the Scottish music publishing industry ca.1880-1951.
We’ll come back to the phone-call that I so nearly mistook for a cold call (luckily, I didn’t!), and then I finalised details for another lecture in the spring. this time about Scottish song books over an even longer era.
FOUR ‘appearances’ (or arrangements for appearances) in one day? Librarians don’t often get that. But as it happens, only the first of them was really library related. I wrote an article about my hybrid role, over the weekend, and yesterday simply underlined the truth of it.
The ‘cold call’ turned out to be from the BBC! Just before 7 am today, I was a guest of BBC Radio Scotland for their Good Morning Scotland programme, talking about the top ten most popular Scottish songs in Visit Scotland’s recent survey. You should have seen me last night, surrounded by song-books much more recent than my usual fare! I needed to get an idea of the chronology of that ‘top ten’. I now have a beautiful document, halfway between a mind-map and a spreadsheet, which I stared at until I had memorised an overview of what I might find myself talking about.
Here’s a link where the programme can be replayed. My bit is from 53:01 to 1:00:09.
The Evening Times published the top-ten list last night. One Burns song (‘My heart’s in the Highlands’), and one by Walter Scott – ‘Scots wha’ ha’e’. Visit Scotland’s recent survey rest were much more modern, but almost all combined a catchy tune and a humorous ‘story’.
Visit Scotland’s recent survey as reported in the Evening Times.
In the research part of my role (the 1.5 days a week when I am seconded to be a researcher), my path was very clear before Christmas – I was revising my monograph. Having submitted the revisions (on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, no less), what’s next?
Easy, I thought to myself. Whilst I wait for feedback, I’ll just put in a couple of article proposals, then get on with some more research about some interesting elements that I focused on in my book. I have a book to review. And in due course, there’ll be copy-editing and indexing – that’ll keep me occupied! Not to mention looking for grants for which to apply.
Four days later, and I now also have two peer-review tasks to do within the next three weeks, and I need to make a recording of my Exchange Talk, just as a back-up in advance of what I hope will be a live Zoom event …
I have 5.5 days in which to do all this. It’s just possible that anything without a deadline might get put to the end of the queue!
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I’m a Librarian and a Postdoctoral Researcher. (My secret skill is, basically, finding things!) I’ve just finished writing my second book – and I guess I’m lucky. I wasn’t dependent on the British Library. It’s too far away for me to visit more than infrequently.
I keep coming across social media comments that “the British Library is doing nothing.” That they’re not taking the situation seriously. That “nobody knows what’s happening.” I don’t work at the British Library, but I do feel heartily sorry for anyone working there. They’ve been victims of a serious cyber crime, for heaven’s sake, and I’m sure that they’ve been taking the best advice about cyber security in light of the attack. It’s the kind of thing where they won’t want to divulge too much of what has been done, for fear of copycat crimes, but at the same time, we the public (especially scholars and academics) all know the end result. We can’t use their catalogue or their e-resources. Visitors have to wait whilst librarians look things up in paper and card catalogues, and with the best will in the world, the service isn’t quite what we’re used to. It’s devastating.
It’s not that the British Library hasn’t tried to keep us up to date:-
Writers left in a bind by British Library cyber-attack, but it remains a closed book
Rachel Cooke’s letter to the Observer, link retweeted by the Guardian
Rachel Cooke
I think what worries me is that people may not know about other ways of finding information. Certainly, if the British Library is the only holder of a particular document, then you’re up the creek without access to that document. If the only way you can access a database, or a digitised copy of a rare document, is via the British Library, then similarly, you really are in a bind at the moment. I know. As a researcher myself, I know.
But are researchers and students asking their own institutional librarians? And conversely, are library organisations saying, often enough (on social media and elsewhere), that librarians are happy to help wherever they can? OK, ‘often enough’ is as long as a piece of string, but say, several times a week? Are we the librarians telling our own patrons in our own libraries?
If you’re at an academic institution in the UK, there is SCONUL Access. That gets you into other libraries as well as your own.
Anyone can look at Jisc Library Hub Discover to find out whether there are copies of books elsewhere in the country. You can find books in the British Library, sure, but also in dozens of other academic libraries, and other big libraries. Yes, databases and other online resources like journals etc, are generally restricted by licence to people AT a particular institution, but you can still sign up to SCONUL Access and go to look at books and other hard copy material in other universities etc.
Have you tried your big city public library?
Are you aware that inter-library loans can be obtained from nearly all libraries except the ones that have a legal deposit responsibility? They don’t just come from the British Library. Your university or college library can organise this. Public libraries do inter library loans too.
Have you looked on Internet Archive or Hathi Trust for digitised copies of older material? Even Google Books?
Have you consulted your own specialist librarian to see if they can think of other ways you can get to see that crucial book or article?
Have you looked at ResearchGate and reached out to scholars directly, if there’s a particular article that even your librarian hasn’t been able to source?
Now, I’m just one small academic librarian/postdoctoral researcher in one small academic institution. I can’t help everybody! But please, please, do reach out to your librarians. We can’t replace the invaluable, much-loved and extraordinarily well-resourced British Library, but we can certainly help you make sure that you haven’t left other stones unturned, that might be able to provide at least some of what you need?
Well, folks, I have a preface, revised introduction, seven revised chapters and a revised conclusion … all in a zip file. I finished my revised book manuscript last night, ready to go off this morning. And it feels – Strange. I wondered if I’d feel triumphant when I clicked ‘Send’. But, at the moment, it’s cautious relief with a side of exhaustion. Let’s put the kettle on.
I did my PhD part-time, in my spare time, between 2004-09. Then there was more spare-time work turning it into a monograph, published in 2013.
From 2012-15, I was part-time RA to a major AHRC grant (but still 80% a librarian), and then – there’s a common thread here – I was awarded an AHRC networking grant (which I did part-time) on a different topic, before my hybridity changed to 85% librarian as I started research for this, my second monograph. The initial draft was submitted last summer, a decade after the first book was published.
It was with some envy that I read about an academic starting their research leave this year. I’m sure it’s well-deserved. I’m just wistful, because, apart from being allowed a month for writing up my PhD (yes, I know – we all know – it took much longer than that!), I’ve basically taken annual leave whenever I needed it. That’s what happens when you are more of a librarian than a researcher.
Apart from a brief visit home last summer, I didn’t take a proper break, because I was writing. I only took a week’s pause for Christmas, before jumping back into book revisions. It’s not surprising I’m knackered.
I can’t pretend I’m a full-time academic. I cannot, and should not, compare myself with people in a fully academic role. I’m mostly a librarian – admittedly, an academic librarian – but I’ve been a research fellow (part-time plus some annual leave), and I’ve just finished writing a second scholarly monograph (ditto). Given the time constraints, and the fact that I can’t be researching or writing when I’m being a librarian, I’m modestly proud of that.
Exhausted but provisionally exhilarated … it’s the Twelfth Day of Christmas. After the obligatory drummers drumming, etc, etc, never mind the partridge!
And a book, with best wishes, from me.
Cover Image by Circe Denyer from Pixabay
Seriously, why do we do year-end reviews? To show the world what we’re most proud of? Quite possibly. To convince ourselves – and the world – that really, we’ve been very busy and deserve a pat on the back? Perhaps so. I took to the internet to find out why businesses do reviews, and why a career-minded individual might do one of their own.
Braze.com said that year-end reviews offer the chance to ‘create distinctive content’; to ‘build loyalty’ and to remind the world what your particular business does best. To that end, obviously you log milestones, achievements and events. You use multimedia formats, and draw upon customer data. This all makes sense, although I don’t know that I, as an individual, can do all these things. (No customers, for a start!)
I tried again, and found a Harvard Business Review posting about, ‘How to create your own “Year in Review“. There’s plenty of sound advice here, suggesting that I should pause and reflect upon successes and failures; lessons learned; proudest achievements; who has helped me most; how my strengths have helped me to succeed; and whether there’s anything I wish I’d done differently. This is much more introspective, and certainly valuable advice. Whether I’d want to blog about all these headings is a moot point, though.
For me, I have an extra conundrum. I shall be retiring from the Whittaker Library at the beginning of July. I hope to continue the research element of my work, though. So – in one sense I’m writing a career-end review, as far as librarianship is concerned, but it’s not a career-end review for me as a researcher.
The Harvard Business Review suggests using your diary to capture key events on which to reflect. I spent a few minutes doing just that, yesterday. Immediately, I realised that there’s one thing I’m proud of over everything else, and that is that although I spend 85% of my time as an academic librarian, my 15% as a postdoctoral researcher is actually highly productive.
What do I do best? I get things done.
I confess, I don’t like hearing this! It makes me feel as though my research activity is dismissed as dilettantism – that I don’t do badly, considering research isn’t my main role. On the other hand, a fly on the wall would point out that yes, I do spend the majority of my time as a librarian.
So, what did my diary exercise reveal? I’ve catalogued a lot of jazz CDs. This causes me to feel quite a bit of resentment, because I know our readers don’t generally listen to CDs as a format, so all my efforts are to very little avail indeed. Maybe that’s one of the things that I wish I’d done differently. It’s not a high-priority task; however, I am conscious that I don’t want to leave the backlog to my successor. And that’s why I do this dreadfully tedious and repetitive activity!
Retrospective Post Script: that jazz CD cataloguing was indeed a waste of time. I did it because the promise had been made that those CDs (thousands of them) would be catalogued. I didn’t make the promise, but I did feel the obligation to fulfil the promise. My resentment was because it used so little brainpower and expertise, provided so very little fulfilment in the moment, and so little benefit in the long-term.
What I’m more proud of is my efforts to get more music by women and composers of colour, into the library, and most particularly, to ensure that our staff and students know just how much of it there now is in our stock. With a colleague from the academic staff, I’m concocting a plan to raise the profile of this material.
I also suggested maybe there might be a prize for diverse programming …
And I just heard – there is going to be such a prize – it really is happening. A red letter day!
For me, a particularly proud moment was being invited to attend a Masters student’s final recital in June, at which one of these new pieces was played. It was a piece requested by a member of staff – I don’t think it was me that actually stumbled across it – but I certainly sourced it, catalogued and listed it. Whilst I’m heartily sick of cataloguing, I do take pleasure in stock development, and in ensuring there are ample means of discovering the music once we have it.
In September, I was gratified that one of our performance departments reached out to me to request more materials by under-represented composers – a sign that the message is getting through, and that staff appreciate that the library really is trying to help.
Since October, I’ve also been broadening the stock of music inspired by climate change and ecology, including songbooks for school-children, since we have a number of music education students. That pleases me, too.
What else? Dealing with donations to the library, some eagerly received and others needing sifting through. Weeding stock to ensure there’s room for new material, and ensuring that tatty material is removed or replaced depending on how much it’s likely to be used.
Some things are cyclical – most particularly providing initial library introductions, and later talking to different year-groups about good library research practice. In June, I gave a talk about bibliography to the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, which attracted far more of an audience than I’d ever dreamt of!
I’ve also dealt with queries – such as one from a Polish librarian, or another from an elderly enquirer wanting to trace music remembered from childhood. And I talked about my research activities at a library training session, even though I was rather afraid of wasting colleagues’ time going on about something that might not feel very relevant. (This autumn, I also obtained and catalogued – in detail – a book of Scottish songs that I have written a book chapter about. It would be dreadful, wouldn’t it?, if someone read the chapter but couldn’t find the song-book in the library!)
Professionally, I managed the comms for the IAML Congress in Cambridge this summer (with a little bit of help from mascots Cam, Bridge and Don and a couple of fellow IAML (UK & Ireland) librarians, and I think it went quite well. The stats for the blog and Twitter (“X”) rose gratifyingly during this period. I went to a couple of days in Cambridge, but I didn’t speak this time.
Early on in 2023, I was gratified to receive an LIHG (Library and Information History Group) Bursary to attend a conference at the University of Stirling between 17-19 April, which was about Reading and Book Circulation 1650-1850. This was to be the first of two major successes this year, for I was also elected the inaugural Ketelbey Fellow in the Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St Andrews. I’ve written extensively about this experience in other blog-posts, so I won’t duplicate it here. However, I can’t resist reminding myself of highlights!
Being a researcher for 15% of the time is not easy – there simply isn’t the time to do all I want to do. Far from ‘dabbling’ in research, I take this side of my work very seriously indeed. I might have been a librarian most of the time, but I have devoted far more than the designated 10.5 hours a week to my research activity! I took annual leave in the summer to get my book draft completed, and took more annual leave to enable me to spend two, rather than 1.5 days researching in St Andrews. I’m doing it again next week; the book revisions must be completed and submitted very soon, and if the only way I can do it is by taking holiday, then that is what I must do.
Sometimes I feel despondent about how little I’ve achieved, but then I remind myself that I’m not a full-time academic!
I’ve peer-reviewed an article, a book manuscript and a grant application. Considering all that I’ve had on my plate this year, I’m quite proud that I did manage to do these things. I don’t attend reading groups, and I’m not always able to attend research-related events that fall in ‘library time’ – I don’t want to give the impression I’m skiving off library work! But I do want to feel part of the research community, and that was precisely what was so magical about my Fellowship in St Andrews. For those two days a week, I was a researcher, pure and simple.
I’m looking forward to the summer. I feel I’ve been a librarian long enough. I’ll miss doing the user education, and rising to the challenges posed by unexpected or unusual queries. I shan’t be sorry to quit cataloguing, particularly jazz CDs!
I don’t actually have any ‘retirement’ plans as such. Apart from having more time to spend on my role as Honorary Librarian of the Friends of Wighton in Dundee. Whilst I live on the other side of Scotland, at least I shall have more opportunities to leap on a bus or train to get to Dundee Central Library to look after the repertoire that I love.
I don’t feel remotely like a little old lady! I hope I’ll continue as a postdoctoral researcher in my present institution, but I’m also keeping my eyes open for any other part-time opportunities that I could pursue alongside that. ’Actively looking’, is the phrase, I think.
With a colleague in another institution, we’re cautiously planning a new research idea. And I also have strands of research that I commenced for my book, but hope to pursue in greater depth once this book is safely further along the publication process. Watch this space.
When I’m not occupied as a researcher or a librarian, I’m the organist at Neilston Church of Scotland. I’m not exactly a serious composer, but I do compose occasional Christmas carols, both lyrics and music. This year, because the church choir is few in numbers, I felt that a bit of instrumental backup would help. The Salvation Army band led Wednesday night’s carol service, so I politely requested two cornets to accompany me on the organ. Wow! That certainly brightened things up.
By and large, the carol was well-received. Although I sensed from one comment that I need to make next year’s effort more upbeat! Someone else thought it sounded Scottish. I suppose there IS a gapped scale in the verse part of the melody, though I didn’t set out to use a Scottish idiom!
My composition was inspired by my thoughts that the traditional story focuses on men – shepherds and wise men – but there must have been women in the Inn. There must! In Biblical times, women didn’t generally have a high profile. Who helped Mary give birth in the stable? Hard to imagine that Joseph manfully rolled his sleeves up to help, if there were women around.
Neilston used to be a weaving village, so my allusions to the warp and weft of fabric are a gentle reference to the past of our locality.
So … here are the lyrics of my Christmas carol:-
4. For the warp and the weft,
Careful hands moving deftly,
Made linen our Saviour to wrap and enfold,
As we pause to reflect how the humblest endeavours
Can be holy in ways that could scarce be foretold.
CHORUS
Link to choir rehearsing first verse and chorus
Cover Image by Melissa Manning from Pixabay
