Coming from a music performance background, I never imagined that I’d get into the fields of Library Science and Archiving.  Originally from Chicago, I completed my bachelor’s degree in opera performance in the US, spent a year in New Delhi learning Indian classical vocal music and then came to London for the Master’s program in Ethnomusicology at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).    

After a lecture at the British Library about intellectual property rights with regard to sound recordings, I took up the curator’s offer to learn more about accessioning and cataloguing music from around the world by volunteering at the Sound Archive.  

As a volunteer, I listened to music recorded by researchers in other countries as well as commercially released CDs, and I learned how to write descriptions for the Sound Archive catalogue, so others would be able to find the recordings easily.  The skills I learned as a volunteer prepared me to apply for jobs within the Sound Archive, and I soon secured a place on the Archival Sound Recordings Project team.    

I began as ‘Digitisation Assistant’, preparing old shellac discs for digital transfer and creating a new procedure for ripping CDs using an XML script via an Access database.  I was promoted to ‘Metadata Editor’ after six months, and now I organise the information which describes the sound recordings destined for our project’s website, making sure the content of the audio files created matches the descriptive metadata.   

I have recently been accepted into the Ethnomusicology PhD program at the University of Chicago, and I expect to integrate my interest in learning about the world through music with my passion for the archival preservation and ethical dissemination of that music.