A few weeks ago, Jerry McBride, Mimi Tashiro, Jon Manton, Casey Mullin (our musical colleague in Lathrop Library) and I traveled to the Mile High City of Denver Colorado for the 84th annual meeting of the Music Library Association.  We were greeted by a swirling snowstorm and single-digit temperatures: novel to us, not so much for the East Coast attendees!

Sessions on digital humanities initiatives, new library services, digital sound, changes to catalog terminology, music information literacy, and a lot more was on offer.  Jon and Jerry presented on the Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls, and Jon also participated in a panel on emerging services in music libraries, introducing the Archive of Recorded Sound’s automated system for handling, documenting, and delivering patron-initiated digitization requests. Casey helped lead the training session on new music vocabularies, and co-presented a session on the future of music cataloging, highlighting Stanford’s exploration of Linked Data and the Semantic Web (Nancy Lorimer was also part of this presentation, in spirit).

An engaging opening plenary session focused on Colorado’s musical legacy, with presentations on the University of Colorado Boulder’s American Music Research Center; songs inspired by Colorado, from America, the Beautiful to Rocky Mountain High; and a sweeping history of opera in the Rockies during The Silver Rush of the late 19th century. Many of the sessions were videotaped, and the videos, along with accompanying slides and handouts, are available on the conference website.