The 94th Annual Meeting of the Music Library Association is scheduled to be held online from March 17-21, 2025. The MLA Program Committee invites proposals for program content until 11:59pm PDT on Friday, August 30, 2024.
The Music Library Association Annual Meeting is open to anyone with an interest in music and performing arts libraries, archives, collections, or librarianship. We encourage proposals that are topically or practically relevant to these areas; see Selection Criteria below for particular topics of interest. We welcome proposals from library, archives, and information technology professionals, students, faculty, and others, regardless of MLA membership. We especially encourage proposals from individuals and communities that have been historically underrepresented and/or marginalized in library work and in society as a whole.
Proposal Types
Sessions are 25, 55, or 85 minutes in length and can be in person, remote, or hybrid. Hybrid sessions include a combination of in person and remote (synchronous or asynchronous) presentations. Poster presentations take place within a specified conference time. Session types include:
- Presentation (individual, joint, or panel)
- Plenary presentation (individual, joint, or panel). Plenaries are always 85 minutes in length. No other meetings, sessions, etc. are scheduled during plenaries. The content of plenaries should be of broad interest to Annual Meeting attendees.
- Interactive presentation (significant audience engagement via an interactive, hands-on, or discussion-based component; can be individual presenter(s) or panel)
- Town Hall (open discussion forum for topics of urgent interest to attendees)
- Poster presentation
- Other type of sessions not mentioned above
Submission Guidelines
- An abstract is required and should be no longer than 3000 characters (not words).
- Provide the names and email addresses of all known presenters.
- Please apply as a presenter for no more than two sessions. Any individual may participate as a presenter in up to two sessions total (individual, group, or poster). This limitation does not apply to session moderators or participants in scheduled Committee business meetings and Interest Group meetings.
- Sessions at the MLA Annual Meeting are for the educational benefit of attendees; proposals promoting or selling products or services will not be accepted.
Selection Criteria
MLA Annual Meeting proposals are reviewed by members of the Program Committee. Proposals will be selected on the strength of their abstracts, based on these criteria:
- The main points of your session
- Relevance to attendees
- How your proposal is unique or different from others that may address the same topic
- How presenter(s) will engage the audience
- Learning objectives, goals, or outcomes
Special consideration will be given to proposals:
- Submitted by first-time presenters
- Addressing new or emerging areas of music librarianship
- Fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration
- Relating to the most requested topics in the 2024 MLA post-conference survey:
- Cataloging and Metadata
- Professional Development, Leadership, and Management
- Instruction & Information Literacy
- Collection Development and Management
The Program Committee will evaluate proposals as anonymous submissions except in cases where the identity of presenters is a vital part of the proposal. The Program Committee will additionally strive to select a balance of proposals reflecting the range of institutions (academic, public, special, etc.), specializations (cataloging/metadata, archives, information literacy, collection development, etc.), and audiences (librarians, archivists, paraprofessionals, students and emerging professionals, retirees, etc.) represented at our Annual Meetings.
Session Discussion Spreadsheet
The Program Committee has created a public spreadsheet to allow sharing of proposal ideas and to connect potential collaborators. The spreadsheet is an informal tool, and the information in it will not be used by the Committee in evaluating program proposals.
Proposal Submission
Proposals must be submitted online via the Session Proposal Form.
The Call for Proposals is now closed.
Please Note
The MLA 2025 Annual Meeting is being planned as a virtual event.
A separate call for Community Choice proposals will occur in Fall 2024. Instead of being selected by the Program Committee, Community Choice presentations are selected in an open voting process announced on the MLA-L listserv.
A separate call for Committee and Interest Group meeting requests is forthcoming.
