In the Spotlight with… Kristi Bergland Lisa Romano, Column Editor
Kristi Bergland at Hippo Lake
In July, Kristi Bergland will become OLAC President. Kristi is currently a Music Metadata Librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. She is responsible for cataloging music scores, sound recordings, DVDs, streaming media, e-books, manuscripts, zines, and microforms. Her recent projects include cataloging and digitizing a 19th century hymnal collection, several large scale shifting and withdrawal projects, cataloging a hip-hop collection, and creating accessible documentation for Technical Services work. I love that my work is always changing. I feel very fortunate to work in an environment where I get to work with a broad variety of resource types, subject areas, and languages. I am always learning something new. Among her favorite projects is the collaboration on digital humanities projects with faculty and students. Kristi is able to offer knowledge of audiovisual formats and metadata structures, and in return, she has learned about content and data management environments. Specifically, she is involved with a website being built to support the book “Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America” by musicologist Peter Mercer-Taylor. Not only has she been able to help build the website (which includes Mercer-Taylor’s transcriptions of all the hymns in his book and aims to include sound recordings of all hymns by various choirs), but as part of the ELM Ensemble of Dexter, Michigan Kristi has been able to sing on some of the recordings as well! And what does she enjoy most about her job? I love seeing the product of other people’s passions, shared with others as library resources. I am awed by the sheer variety of materials that cross my desk and the tremendous amount of creative effort, time, imagination, and passion that have gone into them. Probably, the weirdest item Kristi has cataloged over the years was a group of anatomical teaching models used for vocal pedagogy: human half head, vocal tract, lung model with larynx. It was one of my first experiences with non-print materials and made me stretch the way I thought about how to describe and analyze library materials. At the same time, it was a crash course in the limitations of “pieces” as a descriptive term.
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