- Name: Andrea Copland
- Year/progress in degree and years as an emerging professional: Second year (of 3) as a dual degree Oboe Performance and Musicology master’s candidate. One year as an emerging professional (continuing student? – ha!) post-MLIS.
- School and/or program and Professional affiliation: I’m currently working and studying at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and received my MLIS from the University of Denver, where I also worked full-time as Music Library Supervisor.
- Area of interest: Reference, open-access, programming and outreach, instruction, digital humanities, and archives.
- Why did you choose librarianship as a career path? Libraries cultivate inclusive communities and offer free education for the taking by increasing society’s access to informational and technological resources. That’s patently badass; who wouldn’t want to work as a librarian? Practically speaking, I knew that librarianship would wed my academic curiosity with professional and technical skills in a productive career. Music librarianship is a particularly exciting career path because of the many opportunities it provides to deepen musicians’ understanding of their craft and to enliven and contextualize performance.
- What is/was your favorite part about library school? My favorite part of library school was its immediately practicable application to my professional goals. Through close relationships with research faculty, I was able to work closely on CV-building projects while also expanding my technical repertoire and networking. The people are also fabulous: you will find that your cohort will scatter across the country and that you’ll have a national network in no time.
- What has been your best experience as a member of MLA? My favorite memory from my first MLA conference was sitting in the back of a breakout session, texting with my boss about the ideas we were going to take home to our library. MLA panels are also a great way to meet both emerging and established librarians with similar interests, and to engage in challenging discussions with them.
- What advice would you give to a beginning library student? Join twitter. Library twitter is both entertaining and endlessly useful. Also, double up (not down): Work at libraries as much as you can to build your CV, and engage in coursework/internships/final projects that you can tout in interviews and presentations. Also, use your better-than-ever database skills to keep researching and writing meaningfully about the things you love!
If you are in the Atlantic Chapter of MLA and would like to reach out to Andrea with ideas or requests, you can do so here.