A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity … being Advertised by Routledge!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I was all set to blog about the Librarian’s Last Tuesday, but my lunchtime discovery makes all that stuff about library owl mascots and jazz CDs seem rather trivial!

There I sat, half-heartedly eating my sushi, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet looked to see if my forthcoming book is advertised on the publisher’s website yet. I practically dropped the sushi in surprise (it wasn’t Boots’s best effort) when…

A Social History of Amateur  Music-Making and Scottish National Identity

There was my book looking at me! It’s the first time I’ve seen the title on the cover that I chose a few weeks ago. 

I haven’t even seen the proofs yet, and I’m still indexing it, but it’s really exciting to see its outward appearance.

Okay, it was the Performing Arts Librarian’s Last Tuesday.  But it was also the last Tuesday before I cease to be a partially-seconded researcher. In eight days I’ll be a part-time Post Doctoral Research Fellow.  Still indexing the forthcoming monograph!

Coming soon …

Headline News! Book Progress

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951

I’ve just heard I should get the proofs of my second monograph by the end of July.

It looks as though the start of semi-retirement is going to be action-packed, doesn’t it? You might almost think I’d planned it that way, but in truth, it’s just how things have worked out.  Any planning was really no more than my thinking, ‘yes, that will probably work out rather nicely’.

I need to start thinking about indexing.  Indeed, I have made a partial start, but so far only focusing on one aspect.

Let me just stop coughing and get this beastly flu-bug out of the way, and then I’ll roll my sleeves up!

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Articulating Your Research

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’m currently reading a new book in the Routledge Insider Guides to Success in Academia series:

Be Visible or Vanish: Engage, Influence and Ensure your Research has Impact (Routledge, 2023)

The authors are Inger Mewburn and Simon Clews; since I’ve followed Inger’s work for a number of years, I knew it would be good, and I got it for RCS Library recently.

It’s an approachable guide, and the kind of book you can tuck into a bag or pocket to read at free moments during the day. This morning as I drank my pre-work latte, I was reading the chapter on making academic small-talk, and being ready with an answer to the inevitable question:-

So, what is your research about?

(A reasonable question in any situation!)

It particularly resonated for me this morning, because I take up my honorary Ketelbey Fellowship at St Andrews tomorrow. Not only that, but a family member had been asking me the same question last night! What are you studying there? Why there? How are you going to benefit from the experience? It wasn’t intended as preparation for the sort of questions I should be anticipating, but I nonetheless took it as a prompt to think carefully about how I shall be introducing myself when I meet new colleagues!

I’ve also heard this described as an ‘elevator pitch’ – though in my case, I would need the elevator to travel more than one floor! As I’ve said before, the title of my recently-submitted book doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. However, it outlines what my research has been about in recent years so I have to be able to trot it out.

  • A social history (yes, that describes it well)
  • of amateur music-making (make no mistake, that’s what we’re talking about – it’s not generally about serious, cutting-edge classical music)
  • and Scottish national identity (this is such a big deal, that it’s inextricably interwoven throughout the whole book)
  • [And then there’s the subtitle!] : Scotland’s printed music, 1880-1951 (I’ve been looking at the output of Scottish publishers during this era, which proved much more interesting than even I had ever imagined. When I got to 1951, I got to fever-pitch excitement. You’ll have to wait for the book to find out why!)

But, back to the questions of last night. I’ll be revising the book when it returns from the reviewer(s). I’ll also be investigating a particular aspect of my research that still merits even deeper investigation. I’ll be exploring a bigger, richer library collection than I usually have access to, and I look forward to engaging with a lot of different research scholars, hopefully gaining fresh ideas and maybe ideas for new directions or collaborations.

Most of all, I’ll be settling into my academic role – yes, I know, I’m a seconded researcher back in my home institution, but it’s new for me to be a Fellow for a few months – and I’ll be thinking about my future ‘second career’ as a researcher once I retire from music librarianship next summer.

Now, where was I with Be Visible or Vanish …?