As a much-admired member of the IAML (UK & Irl) community retires next week, we grabbed him just in time to contribute to our “Week in the life” series. Roy Stanley writes:
On 30 September I will retire after over 35 years as music librarian at the Library of Trinity College Dublin. I’m therefore very much in ‘tidy-up’ mode, trying to leave things as ship-shape as possible for whoever will succeed me in the role. For most of those years I have been the sole staff member dealing with all aspects of the music collections and services. So the corporate memory resides almost entirely in me! Therefore one of my principal activities at the moment is documentation – creating a handover file including standard operating procedures and associated information for all sorts of music library activities: processing and cataloguing of collections, liaison with academic staff, library skills training, etc.
I’m also trying to clear some long-standing cataloguing backlogs (some of which even date back to my predecessors’ time) – all kinds of ‘awkward’ items that tend to be put on the long finger if they are not urgently needed. I suspect most of us are guilty of this procrastination to some degree! It’s quite gratifying to see some dusty piles of sheet music finally shrink after years of neglect.
Alongside these tasks, the day-to-day work continues. Most of the students are on their summer break but the academic staff are still around and have been turning their minds to next year’s course needs. A new module on women composers of the ‘long nineteenth century’ is offered, so a large portion of this year’s book budget has been spent on publications and scores relating to some less-familiar composers – Emilie Mayer, Mel Bonis, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louise Farrenc, to name a few. A welcome expansion and diversification of our holdings.
Speaking of women composers, it has been thrilling to see the explosion of interest in the music of Ina Boyle (1889-1967) over the past two decades, based around the collection of her manuscripts held in our Research Collections department. To facilitate the production of typeset editions – essential for performance – we have been digitising many of the manuscripts and making them available online at digitalcollections.tcd.ie. The Ina Boyle Society as well as individual performers and researchers contact me on a regular basis with enquiries about the collection.
The latest delivery of legal deposit sheet music has arrived and is quickly processed, mostly using records already available for download from the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) – thank you, colleagues at the Bodleian, the British Library, and elsewhere! I also participate in an online meeting of the legal deposit libraries’ Sheet Music Task Group, where we discuss plans to encourage self-publishing composers to deposit works they have issued in electronic form. The group also provides a useful forum for discussion of issues surrounding ‘traditional’ print deposits.
Over the past decade or so I’ve spent much of my time cataloguing some of our most important ‘legacy’ collections, including the library of Ebenezer Prout, professor of music at the University of Dublin (Trinity College) 1894-1909. My research into this collection will be published in Brio this year in two instalments. The editor has just sent me the proofs of Part 1, which I return with a couple of minor changes. I’ve been very grateful to successive editors over the years for the opportunities Brio provides to extend knowledge of our collections and services – and, of course, to learn about others from colleagues throughout the UK and Ireland.
This cataloguing work has made me acutely aware of how poorly our collections are currently represented in the RISM database, so I have been in contact with the RISM editorial office in Frankfurt to arrange cataloguing access to Muscat. As a first step I have begun to add IRL-Dtc holdings information to existing records for printed sources, but there is much more to be done and I suspect that this is a project that will keep me busy (on a voluntary basis) well beyond retirement!
As music librarians most of us work alone or in small teams in our respective institutions, so the sense of community and collaborative spirit fostered by IAML is of enormous value. I have been active in IAML (UK & Irl) for over twenty years and feel greatly enriched by participation in its committees, conferences and training events, and most of all by the warm friendships forged over that time. I don’t intend to disappear once my official career ends, and look forward to contributing in whatever way I can in the years to come.