ATMLA Program: Temple University, Philadelphia September 30 – October 1, 2022

Friday, September 30, 2022 (Charles Library, Room 401)

10:30-11:15 AM  Tour of Charles Library *Optional*

12:00 – 12:30 PM Registration

12:30 – 1:00  Welcome: Becca Fulop, Performing Arts Librarian and Joe Lucia, Dean of Libraries

Sessions

1:00 – 1:30 Janet McKinney, Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection

1:30 – 2:00 Jennifer Mellizo and Eric Hung, Future-Proofing Music Education in a Time of Change

2:00 – 2:30 Thom Pease, Challenges of Remote Sound Recording Cataloging

2:30 – 3:00 Break: Sponsored by Temple University Libraries

3:00 – 3:30  Emily Waters and Pete Williams, 100 Years of Sound: Institutional Recordings at the Curtis Institute of Music

3:30 – 5:00 Jasmine Clark and Diane Turner, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection (Short walk over to Sullivan Hall)

5:00 – 6:00 Reception at Charles Library, Room 401

Saturday, October 1, 2022 (Charles Library, 1st Floor Event Space)

9:00 – 10:00   Continental breakfast

10:00 – 10:30 Ben Jackson, Persistent Vision: Developing Digital Outreach for Maryland’s Punk Collections

10:30 – 11:00 Rebekah Hill, Putting It Together: A New Idea for DEIA Staff Development

11:00 – 11:30 Jessica Grimmer and Michael Homme, Browsing Guides for Student Engagement in the Music Library

11:30 – 11:45  Break

11:45 – 12:45 Business meeting

*Post-Meeting Bike Ride: See our Fall 2022 Bike Ride page*

 ABSTRACTS

Friday September 20, 2022

Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection, Janet McKinney (Library of Congress)

In March 2020, concert halls, theaters, and other live performance venues were forced to close their doors to protect people from the coronavirus disease. Ensembles, organizations, and individuals were unable to rehearse or perform in person. Losing the means to create their art was devastating—emotionally as well as financially. Yet, while these abnormal circumstances have negatively impacted the security and livelihood of performing artists, many artists also devised innovative ways to conceive art and share it with audiences. 

The Music Division has undertaken a thoughtful strategy to capture this unprecedented time by establishing a carefully curated collection that amasses artistic works and supporting primary source materials that document the performing arts’ creative response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These original works either addressed or were created in response to the coronavirus disease, social distancing, or life in quarantine. This presentation will discuss the working group’s process for defining the scope and criteria of the collection, the outreach and acquisition efforts, example materials found in the collection, as well as the process of creating the division’s first hybrid finding aid.

Future-Proofing Music Education in a Time of Change, Jennifer Mellizo and Eric Hung (Smithsonian Folkways)

For decades, scholars have provided compelling rationales for including culturally diverse learning experiences in the music curriculum. Yet, diversifying the curriculum is a complex, messy, and time-consuming process. Developed by educators, ethnomusicologists, musicians, and cultural practitioners, a new educational initiative, titled Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways (SFLP) seeks to expand the reach of culturally diverse music education, while minimizing its risks. SFLPs are delivered through a series of online slideshows, which can be facilitated in a variety of learning environments (in-person, hybrid, and online). In this presentation, we first examine the unique promise and potential shortcomings of these new educational resources.  Afterwards, we will take a deep dive into a lesson entitled “Mobilizing Asian America.”  The three components of this lesson explore Asian American political activism, the music of the Asian American Movement with a focus on taiko, and the roles and limitations of arts organizations in political activism.  We conclude with thoughts about the implications of this type of music education for music librarianship.

Challenges of Remote Sound Recording Cataloging, Thom Pease (Library of Congress)

Over a career of 17 years at the Library of Congress, the presenter has worked in a technical services division devoted to recorded sound media items which are several hours away from their printed music collections for 15 of those years. This has often presented challenges in doing the necessary research to create music authority records without the full resources of a music library. This talk will pepper in many of the sources he has used in his work, talk about the importance of maintaining knowledge learned in graduate school about musical sources, and present examples of the results of maintaining good relationships with colleagues throughout his institution.  

100 Years of Sound: Institutional Recordings at the Curtis Institute of Music, Emily Waters and Pete Williams (Curtis Institute of Music)

This presentation will narrate a history of Curtis’s institutional recordings, a collection that spans much of the Institute’s nearly 100-year existence. As an archive of student and faculty recitals recorded on a range of formats, the collection constitutes an audio and video history of musical training, performance practice, and recording technologies in European classical music throughout the 20th century, as well as a glimpse into wider cultural and social issues in Philadelphia and the U.S. This history will be presented in the context of professional concerns such as preservation, digitization, access, and metadata, as well as administrative concerns like budgeting, collection development policies, and the library’s relationship to the Institute as a whole.

Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Jasmine Clark (Temple University)

Founded by Charles Blockson, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple is one of the most prestigious collections of African American artifacts in the U.S. The collection houses over 500,000 items relating to the global Black experience. Located in Sullivan Hall, the extensive catalog dates from 1581 to the present. African American studies students are provided with an excellent opportunity to enhance their academic research by making use of the collection. Blockson donated his collection to Temple in 1984 because of our diverse student body and our location in the heart of the African American community in North Philadelphia. The Blockson Collection includes, but is not limited to:

• assorted correspondence of Haitian revolutionaries;
• first-edition works of Phyllis Wheatley and W.E.B. DuBois;
• narratives by Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass;
• Paul Robeson’s sheet music; and
• the John W. Mosley Collection, which documents African American life in and around Philadelphia.

Saturday October 1, 2022

Persistent Vision:  Developing Digital Outreach for Maryland’s Punk Collections, Ben Jackson (University of Maryland)

Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) at the University of Maryland has, for many years, become one of the central repositories for material culture on the Washington, D.C. punk scene. SCPA holds thousands of items relating to the  scene including fliers, photographs, fanzines and recordings, and while many of these were digitized and available for online use, navigating digital collections proved to be an obstacle in promoting access and use for the populations involved in creating these materials. To address this issue, we created the digital exhibit, Persistent vision which serves to contextualize the materials and arrange them in a manner that promotes use by members of the scene. This presentation will explore the development process for this project from wireframing to publication, lessons learned, and how similar work might be done to increase access and broaden the base of users for special collections. 

Putting It Together: A New Idea for DEIA Staff Development, Rebekah Hill (The Pennsylvania State University)

The success of DEIA initiatives truly does begin with the staff. Library staffs are a microcosm of the community they serve, and when all voices are part of the conversation, an organization that supports diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility can be created. Success begins with commitment from the employees, and staff development regarding DEIA is part of that success.

But how do we put it together? How do we design training that will ensure staff buy-in? This presentation seeks to provide a new idea for DEIA staff development that will be engaging and educational, and one that can be implemented at your own library.

You can create staff development programs that are creative, fun, and educational. Having the vision, the execution and putting it together, that’s what counts.

Browsing Guides for Student Engagement in the Music Library, Jessica Grimmer and Michael Homme (University of Maryland)

In the fall of 2021, the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland welcomed students back into the library space for the first time in over a year. While UMD libraries initiated a number of distance programs, the disruption of in-person service created an unavoidable break in both formal and informal instruction, resulting in a loss of institutional knowledge among students. 

Among other outreach activities, we engaged in the creation of instrument- and discipline- specific browsing guides. These postcard-sized aids feature a meme related to the topic as well as important call number ranges for general collections and names of related special collections. These lighthearted library aids intend to help students engage with materials and provide new inroads with our student communities. This presentation will document the creation of these tools in response to loss of institutional knowledge as well as student responses.