Virtuoso Skills for Music Enquiries

I recently went on an excellent training course run by Amelie Roper and Clemens Gresser. The course was on resources for dealing with music enquiries, and I learnt about a whole load of resources I had never come across before. I said to Clemens afterwards that it was the training session I wished I had had when I was an undergraduate music student, as it would have been so incredibly useful to me then. Ah well, now I know about them I'll just have to pass them on to future students to make sure they know more than I did!

Some of the stand out music resources included:

• Music Index journal database with citation search (hosted by EBSCO, who also host RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals, and provide a cross search feature so all three can be searched at the same time) 
• Cecilia - a database of music collections held in libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland
• Encore - union catalogue of performing sets in UK libraries
• Barbican Song Index - "an index to sheet music anthologies of popular, jazz and folk songs, songs from musicals and films, classical songs and opera arias"

A couple of very useful-looking general resources that were mentioned and I hadn't heard of before:

• List of links to UK public library catalogues
• Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (KVK) - meta search engine for national, union and trade catalogues

By Luz Adriana Villa A. on Flickr

Life of a Graduate Trainee, one term in!

So we've have the Christmas carol concert, there are Christmas trees by the porter's lodge and we've hung the baubles on the hatstand. Cambridge Christmas is definitely here, and that means that amazingly, my first term at Newnham is almost finished. (How did that go so quickly?!)

In the last three months I've learnt loads. I've been on all kinds of courses from AACR2 to the manual handling course I went on on Monday (lift with the back, it's the strongest muscle in the body! ...oh wait.) In the library I've been ordering books, cataloguing and processing them, and I've been teaching myself to catalogue sheet music which has been very interesting. Also now I can answer 99% of photocopier questions which were my nightmare when I first started!

I've still got lots to look forward to though, trips to Norwich Millenium and Cathedral libraries, to the library at Corpus, the Conservation Consortium, and the medical library and that's all before Christmas (real, not Cambridge)! Then pretty much straight after the holiday is the Libraries@Cambridge conference where the trainees will be doing a presentation. We had a get-together tonight to put all the bits together for that and it's coming along really well :D And besides all of this at some point I'll find out whether my library school applications were a success...

This week is a fairly busy one in the library, all the book currently on loan are due back tomorrow and then vacation loans begin, and we've also decided to have another book sale! If you're around Newnham pop in at some point this week and do your Christmas shopping pick up some cheap second hand books!

Merry Cambridge Christmas everybody!

Brb, going on a spending spree, kthxbai.

Tomorrow we're having a book sale from 10am-4pm, with all proceeds going towards a travel scholarship. Bringing the books up from the basement stacks earlier today I've already been picking out the ones I'm going to try and snap up in my morning break if they haven't been sold already! Most things are going to be £1 or less, with some hardbacks £2, so if you're around Cambridge tomorrow get down to Newnham College Library and grab yourself a bargain!


In a spending spree of a different kind, I've been ordering medical textbooks today and spent over £1100... (to the more experienced librarians out there this is probably nothing to write home about but made my jaw drop when I saw the total!)

The students are back now, so the enquiry desk is a lot busier, and I'm spending about an hour a day reshelving the returned books instead of the 5 minutes a day it was before this week! We've been running library induction tours, we've done 7 so far, running them bucket-line style so Debbie shows them round the library then passes them on to Jo who shows them how to use the self issue machines, then on to me to give them a reader's ticket each.

I've got an 'Introduction to html' course on Thursday, 'Html - beyond the basics' next Tuesday then 'introduction to AACR2' next Friday, and if I've got any space in my brain to take in anything new after all that I get to go on a visit behind the scenes at the UL Friday afternoon :)

So here's to a busy couple of weeks, now if you'll excuse me I have an episode of House to watch!