Music Library Association National Conference, Dallas, TX

Let me preface this internship blog post by saying that I think that attending a conference like the Music Library Association's national conference greatly added to the quality of my internship.  It is one thing to work with Acquisitions and Collection Development in the library, but it is a whole other arena to discuss it with many librarians, vendors, and publishers who are just as interested and intrigued by it all as you are.  Not only was I able to greatly enhance my own interactions with these people, but I was able to learn about the innovations and efforts taken by members of my own academic community to further these areas.  This post will outline my experience at MLA with the framework of this internship in mind: because obviously I learned a great deal more about music librarianship there than what simply focused on these two areas.

Thankfully, MLA is a much more welcoming conference for students than the other professional association conferences I have attended in my academic career.  I felt that I was valued as a scholar, and seen as the inevitable future of the profession, for which I am both humbled and excited.  But it was my interactions with vendors which put me in my place a bit.

Coming into the conference, I was very interested to get to speak with the vendors that I'd been dropping loads of cash into for the past month or so.  They were more interested in giving me a free pen than talking to me.  Now, do not get me wrong, I am a fan of free pens, but I had hoped to gain insight into their product.  It seems that because I am not an actual librarian, with a library budget at my disposal, that I was not worth their time as much as other attendees.  This is understandable, of course, from a business sense, and I do not think ill of them for this as much as I was a bit disheartened.

Otherwise, I was able to speak with other IU Music Librarianship alums, and feel that my future is bright, and I have made the right decision by attending this school if only judging from their prominent career paths.