And–ACTION!

As ever, there’s rarely a quiet moment around the Music Library. This year saw a flurry of library instructional initiatives including one which was part of the McGill School of Information Studies (SIS) graduate student practicum programme. SIS student Mark Rowland—supervised by Music Liaison Librarian Cathy Martin, with additional input from the Music Library staff—wrote, filmed and edited two instructional videos: Finding Scores in Complete Works Editions Using Grove Music Online and Finding Recordings Using the Catalogues and Online Sources. These videos, we hope, are an important way to offer detailed yet highly-accessible instruction to our library users.

For my part, I was the “face” in front of the camera. Whilst it is somewhat of a shock to suddenly see how you must appear to everyone else in real life (in my case, sort of a library equivalent of Mr. Bean reading the BBC news) filming these videos was a valuable experience. It forced me to think about the ways we communicate within the context of library instruction and how our presentation might be perceived by our users. It was great fun, too!

More recently Cathy Martin—with staff input—wrote a third video script Using Uniform Titles to Find Scores and Recordings. Filmed by Library Assistant Gabrielle Kern, the video is currently in “post production” and slated for “release” later this semester. Apparently the blooper reel is rather long, this time around!