As Librarian at the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM), Allison McClanahan is responsible for managing public and technical services. Her duties include reference, library maintenance, cataloging, collection management, and outreach. She also conducts tours of the ATM and instruction sessions for courses relevant to the scope of ATM collections.
Allison's research interests include representation and description of indigenous and marginalized groups in cataloging and description systems, audiovisual and ethnographic field collection cataloging, and the intersections of public and technical services in libraries and archives. Her recent presentations include "Shedding Disciplinary Divides: Using an ethnographic AV collection across disciplines in student learning" at the Midwest Chapter of the Music Library Association Annual Meeting (Champaign-Urbana, IL) and "Cataloging Vocabularies and the Ethnographic Sound Archive," part of the panel "Bringing the World into the Catalog and the Classroom: Mitigating Western-centrism with controlled vocabularies for music" at the Music Library Association Annual Meeting (St. Louis, MO).
She is professionally active, including serving as Co-Chair for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections' Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee (2017 - present), Member of the Music Library Association's Cataloging and Metadata Committee Vocabularies Sub-Committee (2019 - present), and Vice President/President/Past President of the Indiana University Librarians Association (2017-2020).
Allison's work at the ATM directly relates to many strategies and goals of the IU Libraries Strategic Plan and IUB Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan, including instruction and engagement with primary sources, developing collections that reflect the world’s complexity, diversity, and creativity, making collections discoverable and available to researchers, and partnering to provide meaningful learning experiences to students.
She received her Bachelor of Arts from Indiana University Southeast in 2014, and her Master of Library Science with specializations in music librarianship and archives & records management from Indiana University Bloomington in 2016. Prior to her work at the ATM, she worked for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, with the Latin American Collections at the Cook Music Library, and for the Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) as well as completing internships at the AAAMC and the Butler University Archives.