In Memoriam Mary Wallace Davidson

With the passing of Mary Wallace Davidson on 11 October 2012, the music library and musicology communities lost a beloved and influential leader, scholar, mentor, and friend. Given her long tenure and influence on the profession we thought it suitable to publish a special tribute, and invited the current directors of the libraries with which she was most closely associated—Eastman and Indiana—to compose this memorial feature article for Notes—Ed.

Mary Wallace Davidson: The Eastman Years

The June 1984 issue of The Sibley Muse reported: "On July 1 Mary Wallace Davidson becomes Librarian of the Sibley Music Library. She succeeds Ruth Watanabe, who steps down after 37 years as Librarian. . . . We extend a hearty welcome to Mary, and we all hope that this will be the beginning of a long, happy, and fruitful tenure for her as our Librarian." In fact, it was a long tenure—Mary worked at the Eastman School of Music through 1999, before taking on the leadership of another of this country's most significant academic music libraries, the William and Gayle Cook Music Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. And by all accounts Mary's tenure at Eastman was an exceedingly fruitful one, notably in the areas of conservation of the extensive collections of Sibley Music Library, overseeing the interior design of a new building for Sibley, and in shared leadership for a national collaborative program of retrospective conversion of bibliographic records for music.

Ruth Watanabe's tenure as librarian (1947-84) was noteworthy particularly for expansive development of the circulating collections of Sibley Music Library. Thus, Mary inherited a situation where the sheer extent of the collections had long since outstripped the capacity of the 1937 building on Swan Street, which was designed and built especially for the Sibley Music Library. Further, because the library had been founded in 1904, there was an inevitable problem with the deterioration of older printed materials, due to the highly acidic paper characteristic of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, i.e., "brittle" materials. Thus, in the September 1984 issue of The Sibley Muse, Mary acknowledged both of these issues and stated her initial agenda publicly:

That there is a space problem is a tribute to the comprehensive acquisition policy which Ruth Watanabe developed and pursued in the hardest of times. . . . The challenge of any larger library, particularly at this time when so many of our materials are deteriorating, is to preserve them for future use while still making them available to those who need them now. These are the issues upon which we will concentrate our immediate energies.

Mary wasted no time. Already in October 1984 she engaged a well-known library conservation consultant, George Cunha, to examine the collections and evaluate the library's conservation practices and procedures. She also appointed a Conservation Committee that would put the consultant's recommendations to work, develop a five-year plan for conservation, develop a plan for dealing with potential disaster scenarios, and, finally, develop plans for dealing with brittle and damaged items in the Sibley collections. The December 1984 issue of The Sibley Muse that reported these developments on the conservation front also noted that Sibley had received a small grant "with which to begin our enormous task of retrospective conversion (RECON) of our bibliographic records." Characteristically, Mary was quick to assess priorities, identify resources such as a consultant or grant funding, and then work collaboratively with staff members to make progress in these areas.

Simultaneous with these demanding early months at Eastman and her ambitious agenda setting, Mary was serving as president of the Music Library Association from 1983 to 1985. Being a leader in MLA positioned her well for further national leadership work with the Associated Music Libraries Group (Eastman School of Music, Indiana University, University of Illinois, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Yale University, and Stanford University), this group of music libraries having been formed in large part to collaborate on retrospective conversion of music bibliographic records. A United States Depart ment of Education grant of $233,000 provided funding for an initial...