New England Conservatory Library

Over the summer, Miruna (our amazing student employee in the Cataloging Office) spent a LOT of time working on a project that has been in the works for about ten years: transcribing card catalog cards of NEC recital recordings from the early 1970s through 1982 so they can be found in the online catalog! Between July 2014 and today, Jason Coleman (now our Digital Services Manager) and Miruna have transcribed (or “retrospectively converted”) over 1,000 cards. There are still some left to go, and we decided to fully catalog a significant number of recitals that were previously cataloged only minimally, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel! Many thanks to Jason and Miruna for all their careful, detail-oriented work! It’s not easy!

The library recently received a donation of La Danse des Infidèles, a detailed and heavily illustrated book about the jazz innovator Bud Powell. To accompany it, the library acquired a copy of the English translation as well! In 1986, Paudras wrote this book about his friendship with Powell, translated in 1997 as Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell. This book became the basis for Round Midnight, a film inspired by the lives of Powell and Lester Young, which can be streamed by the NEC community using the QR code in the image!