RIP
I received a message through the Music Library Association email list that Mary Wallace Davidson died yesterday morning, after a long battle with lung cancer. Mary was the director of the Cook Music Library at IU when I arrived as a new grad student in 2000, and she retired around 2005, though she stuck around campus doing some volunteer work for a couple years afterwards before moving back to Boston, where she still remained active within the field of music librarianship and wrote regular concert reviews up until August of this year. She was by far the most caring and dedicated mentor I had the privilege to work with at Indiana; she took me under her wing before I'd even arrived on campus, helped me get my first student job in the music library and helped me move up through a series of other (more interesting and better paid) student positions there, including getting me hourly work, and then a GA, on the Variations2 project.1 I was the only new dual-degree Musicology/Library Science student to enter in the fall of 2000, and she not only connected me to the other music librarians and music librarianship students there, she also often invited me over for dinner, and occasionally hired me to cat- or house-sit for her. She was interested in my work, but also in my life and interests, and this was true of her interactions with my fellow student colleagues as well. I last saw her at the MLA conference in February 2011, literally 3 days after I started my job at UO, and there were a lot of IU music librarianship alums of my generation there; I remember how happy and proud she was at seeing all her little chicks together, now budding professionals in the field.
She always seemed to know everybody (not just in the music library profession, but in the broader music world), and knew the history of every music library everywhere, it seemed. She was great at connecting people to the people she thought they should know. She had a broad reach as a scholar and mentor, and was unfailingly kind and modest.
My friend and IU classmate Thom, now a librarian at the Library of Congress, wrote on his Facebook page yesterday:
There is a saying that "when a person [original quote I found was: old man] dies, a library burns to the ground." I feel that we have just lost one of the greatest libraries in the world today.
I couldn't agree more.
1. I'm not sure if it's ironic or appropriate that the day of her death was also the day I learned that the grant I spearheaded to purchase Variations for the Orbis Cascade Alliance libraries received the highest recommendation score from the State Library advisory committee of all the grant proposals they received this year-- their recommendations go to the State Library Board of Trustees, who make the final awards decisions in two weeks. I definitely would not have felt at all capable of taking on that grant so late in the game without my experience actually working on/with Variations at IU, which was thanks to Mary.
She always seemed to know everybody (not just in the music library profession, but in the broader music world), and knew the history of every music library everywhere, it seemed. She was great at connecting people to the people she thought they should know. She had a broad reach as a scholar and mentor, and was unfailingly kind and modest.
My friend and IU classmate Thom, now a librarian at the Library of Congress, wrote on his Facebook page yesterday:
There is a saying that "when a person [original quote I found was: old man] dies, a library burns to the ground." I feel that we have just lost one of the greatest libraries in the world today.
I couldn't agree more.
1. I'm not sure if it's ironic or appropriate that the day of her death was also the day I learned that the grant I spearheaded to purchase Variations for the Orbis Cascade Alliance libraries received the highest recommendation score from the State Library advisory committee of all the grant proposals they received this year-- their recommendations go to the State Library Board of Trustees, who make the final awards decisions in two weeks. I definitely would not have felt at all capable of taking on that grant so late in the game without my experience actually working on/with Variations at IU, which was thanks to Mary.