Registration for NEMLA's Fall 2025 Virtual Meeting on 11/14/2025 - Now OPEN!
Emily Colucci
New England Music Library Association
Fall 2025 Virtual Meeting
Friday, November 14, 2025, 9:45 am EST – 3:30 pm EST
Agenda:
9:45 am – 10:00 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks / Anne Adams, Harvard University; NEMLA Chair
10:00 am – 10:45 am: “Dating the Undated: Dating Resources for 18th-19th Century Music, with a Twist!” / Andrea Cawelti, Harvard University; Oluwafemi “Femi” Ositade, Harvard College
10:45 am – 11:30 am: “Out of Prague: Jewish Emancipation and the Rise of the Jewish Piano Virtuoso / Tom Moore, Florida International University
11:30 am – 1:00 pm: Lunch Break
1:00 pm – 1:45 pm: Lightning Talks: Lending Beyond Books, Scores & Recordings / Laura K.T. Stokes, Brown University; Nancy Jakubowski, Brown University; Carol Lubkowski, Wellesley College
1:45 pm – 2:45 pm: Committee Meetings
2:45 pm – 3:30 pm: Listening Party / Peter Laurence, Harvard University
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Presentation Descriptions & Presenter Bios
“Dating the undated: an overview of dating resources for 18th-19th century music, with a twist!”
Andrea Cawelti, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Oluwafemi "Femi" Ositade, Harvard College
This presentation will introduce a music-dating program created by Femi Ositade, a Harvard math and computer sciences student, working with Andrea Cawelti on our Advancing Open Knowledge sheet music cataloging grant project at Houghton Library. Andrea will provide an introductory overview of the traditional details and resources required for dating undated music, the project itself, and describe the context that
inspired Femi to create this program; then turn it over to Femi [or a video of Femi] to describe how he envisioned and innovated his program. The program, based on the IMSLP Publishers’ Wiki with additions from music publisher bibliographies, dates published music based on the form of the name of the publisher in conjunction with an
address or plate number. Femi's program can be used as an interface for individual queries or to ingest large spreadsheets of metadata and provide estimated dates or date ranges for large numbers of scores at once. We will provide a demonstration of its individual or multiple functionalities, discuss the limitations of the IMSLP Publishers’ Wiki, then open the floor for discussion of expanding the functionality to include other online resources, and discuss further testing.
This presentation would appeal to a wide range of interested audience members: catalogers who struggle daily to date the vast majority of 18th-early 20th-century published music reliably, or, to reference or learning and teaching librarians, seeking reliable chronological context for specific works. The grant project itself may also be of interest, as it was designed to provide a fertile environment for a computer studies expert to optimize one of many traditionally difficult, time-consuming cataloging tasks.
Ward Music Cataloger at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Andrea Cawelti is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory (Bachelor’s and Master’s in Music, Greenwood Conservatory Prize) and Drexel University (MSLIS), with post-graduate work at The Juilliard School. She began her career as an operatic mezzo-soprano while working at the New York Public Library Music Division, processing copious music-related archival collections and managing their work-study program. Cawelti moved to Chicago in 1995, retiring from the operatic stage to become an archivist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where she cataloged the Theodore Thomas Music Library. When the Symphony Archives were reduced in 2002, she became the Ward Cataloger for the Loeb Music Library at Harvard University. This position moved to the Houghton Library in 2006, where she remains at this time.
Oluwafemi “Femi” Ositade is a second-year student at Harvard College concentrating in Computer Science and Economics. His work in the past has included technology and humanities projects, as well as work at their intersection. At Harvard, he directs the Harvard Undergraduate Quantum Computing Association, is deeply involved in the campus entrepreneurship community, and plays flanker for Harvard Men’s Rugby.
“Out of Prague: Jewish emancipation and the rise of the Jewish piano virtuoso”
Tom Moore, Green Library, Florida International University
My research has been focused on recovering previously ignored/forgotten composers and musical repertoires, including composers/performers for flute from the period 1800-1850, women composers/performers for piano and voice from the period 1800-1850, and Jewish composers/performers from the period 1800-1850, particularly those from Bohemia involved with the musical scene in Prague. This research draws on primary sources from European publications in most European languages, including German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, Slavic languages, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and more. My presentation on Jews from Prague highlights barriers to their activities, including anti-Semitism expressed in the press reviews in the period, as well as mental illness, leading in some cases to internment in asylums or to suicide.
Jewish parents in Prague saw from the success of Ignaz Moscheles that music could be a
realistic career choice; at least one son could be educated in music from an early age,
and aspire to a life in music. My recent research sheds light on the remarkable harvest
of piano virtuosos from Bohemia during the period 1815-1840 - Sigmund Goldschmidt,
Ignaz Tedesco, Alexander Dreyschock, Wilhelm Kuhe, Julius Schulhoff, Charles Wehle,
Bernard Rie, Leopold Lion are virtually all unknown either to modern scholars or to the
modern piano repertoire.
This presentation recuperates music by composers whose work has not just been
forgotten from the standard repertoire, but erased, to draw on Philip Ewell's
conceptualization of racial framing that excludes or underrepresents musicians from
marginalized groups. This certainly applies to the Jewish composers born and trained
in Prague and Bohemia in the first half of the 19th century, whose work met with intense
anti-Semitic rhetoric in the contemporary press, despite their international success. My
research facilitates the inclusion of their music in the contemporary repertoire, based on
values of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access.”
Tom Moore holds degrees in musicology from Harvard and Stanford. His articles on music have been published in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and Hungarian, in journals in the United States, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Hungary. His recent book on twentieth-century music from Czechia and elsewhere was published in May 2025 by Edições Colibri in Lisbon, Portugal. He is head of the Sound and Image Department at the Green Library, Florida International University, in Miami, Florida. He is active as a translator, with books published in his translations from German, Italian, French, and Portuguese.
“Lightning Talks: Lending Beyond Books, Scores & Recordings”
Laura K.T. Stokes, Orwig Music Library, Brown University
Nancy Jakubowski, Orwig Music Library, Brown University
Carol Lubkowski, Music Library, Wellesley College
Music Libraries already handle a wide variety of materials: books, scores in many
formats, and all types of audio-visual media. However, many music libraries also circulate
items that go well beyond these standard materials: musical instruments, recording
equipment, room keys, etc. Our panelists will discuss what their libraries are lending,
the systems they use to circulate them, and the particular issues and complications that
come with handling such items.
Laura K. T. Stokes is the Head of the Orwig Music Library and Performing Arts Collections and Services, as well as a Lecturer in Music at Brown University. Laura holds a Ph.D in musicology from Indiana University, a master’s degree in musicology from Indiana University, a master’s of science in information from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s degree in music from Carleton College. Her book Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide won the 2021 Vincent Duckles Award. She has contributed essays to The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, Rethinking Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context, and the digital project Depicting Glory. She authored the Oxford Bibliographies entry for Fanny Hensel and recently published a co-authored article on the use of anthologies and collections in teaching Black music history in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. She is a co-organizer of the Mendelssohn Network AMS preconference and a member of NEMLA’s program committee, and she served as chair of NEMLA in 2016-2017.
Senior Library Specialist Nancy Jakubowski has worked at the Brown University Library since 1991 and at the Orwig Music Library since 1993. In March 2021, while Orwig was still closed to the public, she made the leap to full-time days after the retirement of her longtime colleague, Sheila Hogg. Nancy shares duties with her newest colleague, Peter Riedel, who took over as the full-time evening and Sunday staff person when Orwig reopened for the Fall ’21 semester. At work, Nancy enjoys digging into our building’s history, along with helping research fascinating topics for patrons – the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival riot, anyone? She has also designed many exhibits over the years, on topics as varied as music of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the current display marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. COVID lockdown, which highlights the pandemic’s impact on music and musicians. Her hobbies include hiking and nature photography, as well as learning tunes by osmosis, while her retired husband practices away on his concertina all day long.
Carol Lubkowski is the Music Librarian at Wellesley College; she was previously the Public Services Librarian at the University of Hartford’s Allen Library. Carol received her BA in music from Wesleyan University, her MM in music composition from The Boston Conservatory, and her MLS from Indiana University. She has presented on the Basic Music Library, library instruction, and stacks maintenance at previous MLA meetings. She was a co-author on the 2024 MSRQ article “Discovery in the Stacks: A Primer (or Refresher!) for Stacks Maintenance of Music Collections in Libraries”. Carol has also published four reviews in Notes. Her interests are the music of living women composers, feminist punk, and the future of audio recordings in libraries.
Listening Party
Peter Laurence, Loeb Music Library, Harvard University
Peter Laurence is Librarian for Recorded Sound and Media at Harvard’s Loeb Music Library. He oversees the library’s general recordings collection, including collection development, outreach, digitization, and curating exhibits. His recent projects include creating an online collection of early 20th-century shellac disc recordings, collaborations with Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute, and co-curating the library’s Making a Scene exhibition on the Boston rock music scene. He is chair of the Discography Committee in the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, and since June 2020, has led a monthly freeform online listening party open to the Harvard Library community.
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Thank you all so much, and I hope to see you at NEMLA's Fall 2025 Virtual Meeting.
NEMLA Program Committee:
Emily M. Colucci (NEMLA Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect)
Laura K.T. Stokes
Sandi-Jo Malmon
Carol Lubkowski
Erin Conor
Brianna Pérez