Introduction

Once upon a time, there was a girl.  And this girl was too impatient to remain in-utero for any longer, and demanded that her poor mother (who is a nurse) stay at the hospital for another twelve hours in order to be born a full month early.  She was blue, tiny, but had quite the set of lungs on her (she had colic twice) and was named Sarah Elizabeth after no one in particular.

Sarah Elizabeth grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania, where her father worked for an industrial company, and her mother quit nursing after her young sister was born.  They lived in a normal neighborhood in a sleepy town.  From a young age, Sarah began spending in exorbitant time in libraries.  Her elementary school librarian, an older woman who was a nun, let her check out /two/ books instead of the normal limit of one at a time, and often laid back new acquisitions for her to gobble up as they arrived.  She spent recess there, helping the woman shelve books.  She spent her mornings there, checking out and returning those two books (which she would read in one night).

This love of libraries would be revisited in her high school years, as Sarah Elizabeth, who'd always had somewhat of a finicky immune system, discovered one chilly February day that she was, in fact, allergic to the solution used to preserve her cat for dissection in Biology II, and thus was banished to the library for the remainder of the unit.  Sarah spent her time instead reacquainting herself with her old friends in the 200s section (she had gone through quite the mythology stage in elementary school), and discovering new friends in classic literature.

When Sarah Elizabeth went off to college, she attended a very small liberal arts school in northwestern Pennsylvania known as Allegheny College.  There she majored in Music, her other great passion, and Women's Studies, a newfound love which grew after she'd decided to take a class on a whim.  Sarah Elizabeth spent her four years there working as a catalog student assistant in the Pelletier Library; a job she regrettably admits she was not too terribly fond of, although enjoyed the people and the atmosphere.  It is hard to like adhering call number stickers to the spines of books day in and out, so she took it with a grain of salt and went on to pursue her Master's degree in Music History -- her great love after spending a summer in Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic.

As a graduate student, Sarah Elizabeth spent perhaps an even greater amount of time in libraries, specifically the Music Library at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  It was there, whilst taking a Music Bibliographies class that she realized for the first time -- "I could be a music librarian!"  It was as if a small gas lamp had been lit in the musty stacks of her brain, and the young woman became excited about the prospect.  With the help of her mentors, she began her search for the right school to continue her seemingly neverending education, and ended up the next fall at Indiana University at Bloomington, home of the only music librarianship specialization in the country.

So here she is.  Here I am, I should say.  Just a small town girl trying desperately to gobble up as much knowledge and experience as I can manage in the one calendar year I am spending here in Bloomington.  I admit to being a hopeless academic in the way that some people are hopeless romantics.  I am a goal-setter, a planner, and have a seemingly endless thirst for knowledge perhaps spawned from those early days in the West Hills elementary school library.  When I get my M.L.S. degree in August of 2012, I'm not sure it will be the end of my educational endeavors, as even now I'm working on my PhD applications in Ethnomusicology (but more on that later).

"'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'" —J. R. R. Tolkien


Thus, this blog is about the journey.  Life is short.  I want to remember the good parts.