For this year’s Southeast Music Library Association’s annual meeting, I served on the programming committee, and as a virtually-attending committee member, co-hosted the Zoom and reported audio/video glitches to the onsite managers.

On the program this year was a survey of graduate-level instruction for music students at four schools (FSU, USC, UNCSA, and App State). All the schools offer instruction in the two main branches of the discipline — history/theory and performance — as well as in the various sub-disciplines, including musicology, music education, music therapy, and film music. Performers are a special challenge to traditional instructional templates, as there is typically no research project to anchor instruction; rather, the focus is on finding information for program notes, performance practice, etc. In the Q&A, a debate arose on whether one common complaint — low student motivation — is rooted in a lack of curiosity, or simply in feeling overwhelmed by digital-age information overload.

In a variant on the “how we done it good” presentation, colleagues from Emory who organized a “rapid cat” workflow for a backlog of LP recordings came to an interesting conclusion: that the return (measured in circulation figures) wasn’t worth the investment of student and staff labor, and that “AI may be the best approach [for such projects] in future.”

Colleagues at Florida State developed a patron-led strategy for processing a large collection of donated scores. Student assistants import catalog records, from which patrons can submit requests; scores that remain unrequested after three years are reviewed by staff. The first three-year review was a slog, but the patron-led part has worked well.

Two colleagues from Vanderbilt — one with experience as a hiring manager, the other as a candidate — shared their observations on the challenges of the current job market. Candidates’ most acute concerns these days revolve around the cost of living, affordable housing, and hybrid work options. Coming a close second is anxiety about increasingly automated hiring processes — being “doxed off” by resume-reviewing software, or finding a person who can be contacted in person to answer questions. Younger candidates report difficulty interpreting the “buzzword bingo” of job posts. Graduates of online degree programs sometimes feel they lack skills in in-person networking, management, and physical materials (digitizing, cataloging). Perhaps most worrying for music schools and other specialized programs is a perceived lack of interest in subject librarianship, and academic librarianship, resulting in an uptick in hires who stay a couple of years to get skills and move on.