So Long, Mary - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

Presented in reverse of the chronological order in which they occurred to me, I give you a list of the top five reasons I might possibly have had for choosing this image to be featured:

5) Because this song from the 1906 musical Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway was composed by George M. Cohan, a childhood vaudevillian-turned-Tin Pan Alley songwriter known more grandly as "the man who owned Broadway" and subject of the 1942 biographical film Yankee Doodle Dandy.

4) Because it would give me the opportunity to point out that CARLI Digital Collections includes five collections of vintage sheet music from four different member institutions, and that a cross-collection advanced search for "Cohan" as creator retrieves 23 items from three of those collections.

3) Because, as my knowledge of musical theater would fit on the head of a pin with room to spare, I could segue into pondering the whimsy of old song titles: "All She'd Say Was Umh-Hum." "And He'd Say Oo La La! Wee Wee." (Tip of the iceberg, there's so much more where that came from.)

2) Because visual aspects of the cover design appeal to my girlie-girlish side: cross-stitch on the front, illustrations of period fashion accompanying lists of songs by decade on the back.

And the #1 reason is ... because it's a thinly-veiled excuse to acknowledge the contributions of Mary Rose to CARLI Digital Collections over the last several years. Because Mary was the DCUG committee member who reinvigorated the Featured Image series with her idea of offering more of a personal reflection on the images, which has made these posts more interesting to write and to read. Also because as SIUE’s metadata librarian, Mary has been an exemplar in creating robust, thorough, thoughtful metadata for digital collections, as well as outstanding collection home pages that exploit--in the best sense--CONTENTdm's CQR (custom queries) feature to provide multiple means of accessing the items contained within. And, finally, because Mary, who is soon to depart our ranks, has been an exceptional colleague and will be missed.

So long, Mary, and thanks.

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Associate Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

To learn more about becoming part of CARLI Digital Collections and using CONTENTdm, see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/contentdm and http://wiki.carli.illinois.edu/index.php/Portal:CONTENTdm.