Day in the Life of a Music Librarian

Well .. half a day, really.  So, what do you imagine music librarians get up to?  

E-RESOURCES: ACCESS
This afternoon saw a quick question about our students accessing online resources from outside the Conservatoire - and a quick answer.  RCS staff and students need to go to our Library web-pages, click on the appropriate e-resources link, and then pick their chosen e-resource (or e-book, or e-journal).  Use Shibboleth institutional access from there - pick the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, then your usual RCS login.  We don't use Athens - so avoid anything mentioning it.

REFERENCING
Then came two two individual consultations about Karen's favourite things.  First, a fairly in-depth discussion about saving citations, then using the Harvard referencing style, and creating a bibliography.  The Whittaker Library has guidelines about Harvard referencing on our part of the RCS Portal.  (Find them here.  If you need more, just Google "Harvard Referencing", and you'll find plenty of other guides!)

If you're referencing a lot of non-standard formats, the best advice is to find an example for something approximately close to your reference, then tweak the example to fit your purposes, making sure the author's name and date of the source are listed first.  If you're referencing something online, then you'll need to give a hyperlink, and also the date you accessed the item.  All this is in our guide.

E-RESOURCES: RESEARCH

The next query was back to e-resources again, but this time about content rather than access.  We talked about finding info about specific musical works.  Naxos sleeve notes are useful.  JSTOR can be useful, too. Oxford Music Online is better for facts about the works' composition dates, opus numbers, where they stand in the composers' output, etc, but may not necessarily give you anything in-depth about individual works.  

So, having delved briefly into online resources, we also looked at CD and vinyl sleeve notes - plenty more info in that direction!  And good old Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music.  It may be old, but could be a good starting place.