I Have Disowned the Library Blog!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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WhittakerLive.wordpress.com

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.

I Trashed it! Letting Things go…

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

For a couple of years, I’ve had a few posts saved as drafts – but I’d never posted them. They contained writing that I had had second thoughts about,  thinking they might ultimately get incorporated into the book I’ve been writing.  Often containing a fair amount of detail, I didn’t want them out in the big wide world all alone, outside the context of the bigger picture.

Occasionally, I’ve deleted such a draft, deciding I had no further use for it. This morning, two more were intentionally trashed, but then … oops! my finger slipped,  and I deleted a substantial draft about James S. Kerr! This wasn’t intentional. However, the book has now been submitted to the publisher; in fairness, I think Kerr has been given generous coverage there. I don’t feel bad about accidentally deleting this extra bit of writing. It appeared as though I wrote it quite a while before I wrote the chapters focusing on different aspects of Kerr and Mozart Allan’s output, and what will appear in the book represents deeper thought about Kerr’s place in Scottish music publishing history.

I also intentionally deleted a short piece about three musical boys from Greenock. If I return to that idea, it’ll be there in my head in any case, because one of them was the grandfather-in-law I never met!

Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to let things go.  Blogs are great places for less formal, experimental or just preparatory writing. But by the same token, not every post needs to be there forever!

(Image: one of the Berkeley Street premises later connected with Kerr’s.)