Who said weekends were restful?! Apart from the usual domesticity, and the organ-playing, I put in some more work on this blog.
Finished radically updating my Bio page to better reflect my two career strands.
Balanced my historical copyright page (Claimed from Stationers’ Hall) with a new one: Copyright Today. My career trajectory means I take a keen interest in copyright, intellectual property, plagiarism and so on. I might as well keep useful material handy, for myself or anyone else stumbling across this blog.
In preparation for retirement from librarianship, I am carefully removing myself from mailing lists; from library reading lists that I set up: and from Whittaker Live!, the library blog I first set up at the Millenium. It’s been a WordPress blog for the past few years. To manage a blog for 24 years must be some kind of a record?
Going Away
Since WordPress knows me as Whittaker Live!‘s administrator, I appointed a second administrator. I still couldn’t divorce myself from it! Eventually, my successor discovered I was not just an administrator, but also Whittaker Live!‘s owner. And so, traumatic as it is, I had to disown the blog I’ve ‘owned’ nearly a quarter of a century. (It feels like when we had to rehome Fergie, our much-loved cat, three decades ago!)
Changed Days
In the early days, I used to post about useful websites for essay assignments, or about forthcoming concerts. It sounds so naive now, when social media and Google make it easy for students to source that kind of information. More recently, I’ve shared help with referencing; sourcing more diverse repertoire; or the pros and cons of using AI, and ethical considerations.
Letting Go
It’s surprisingly difficult letting go of things in which you were invested – like the blog, or the years I’ve spent making our music collection more diverse. Even if I know I’ve left my imprint on the collection, it will start to recede into history after 28 June. Like a handprint in the sand, time will soon wash it away.
On the other hand, I will not miss the 2000-odd jazz CDs that have been the bane of my existence! I won’t even have finished cataloguing all the jazz CDs. That 2000 is the bulk of them, but certainly not the totality.
Life Continues
But I’m still here! It’ll be lovely only to wear my postdoctoral research hat, and not the library one. Does that sound disloyal? It’s not meant to. I’ve been a librarian long enough.
And of course, I have my own blog here, KarenMcAulayMusicologist.blog, to keep you up to date with my research activities. Keep watching! There’s plenty more in store.
Below, you’ll find a blog post that I have just written for the Whittaker Library blog. In my library career, I haven’t changed the world, but I have bought and catalogued quite a lot of music. (Why be modest? Mountains of it!) In the past five years, I’ve focused particularly on equality and diversity – I put a huge amount of effort into it, and I hope it has made a difference to our users. Perhaps one day, there will be an event to raise awareness of all this music. I tried, but I have done all I can. I wish it had been more, and I wish it could have ended more triumphantly.
In an era that’s all about impact and engagement, it can be an up-hill struggle for a librarian to make a significant difference, and even harder to blow one’s own trumpet metaphorically when surrounded by genuine stars in the making, deservedly blowing their own actual trumpets!
Whilst repertoire lists might not seem the most exciting topic in the world, if they’re important to recitalists and other people planning concert programmes, then they’re important to us. We would like to remind everyone that the Whittaker Library does have a lot of music by women and/or BIPOC composers. We’ve committed a fair chunk […]
‘You can read, use your laptop and phone’, says the post-op leaflet. What it SHOULD say, in my opinion, is ‘You can read, use your laptop and phone for short spells, but don’t overdo it.’
I did a musicological blog post last night, web-links and all. By the end of it, my good eye was protesting, and I had a headache for much of today. And I’m shattered!
So … back to the original plan! I will finish my next Audible book, then review it. Bear with me, dear reader!
What’s all this about? Everyone perhaps having to pay to be on Twitter? No, Sir! I’m not actively leaving just yet, but if failure to pay results in accounts disappearing, then I’m afraid I will disappear from Twitter.
I’m on Threads: KarenMcAMusic.threads.net – maybe I should be asking my Twitter followers to follow me there?
And of course, I’m here on my blog.
I know – a blog is not the same as the casual, friendly conversations we used to have on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see what we’re all doing in a year’s time!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 