WWU's Casey Mullin wins MLA's Richard S. Hill Award

Casey Mullin, Head of Cataloging & Metadata Services at Western Washington University Libraries, has been selected by the Music Library Association (MLA) as a winner of the Richard S. Hill Award for the best article on music librarianship or of a music-bibliographic nature for his co-authored article,  “Faceted Vocabularies for Music: A New Era in Resource Discovery.”  

In making the award, the MLA commended Mullin and his coauthors for detailing the development of several Library of Congress music thesauri.  Specifically, MLA noted that the authors’ important scholarly contribution had documented in a clear and jargon-free manner the need for these thesauri, the challenges and issues encountered in developing them, and the issues still to be addressed.

Mullin has held many positions in the MLA, including Chair of the Vocabularies Subcommittee and Chair of the RDA Music Implementation Task Force. He has served on the Executive Board of the Music OCLC Users Group since 2011 and chaired the ALCTS Cataloging and Metadata Management Section Working Group on Full Implementation of LC Faceted Vocabularies.

A few days prior to the announcement of the Richard S. Hill Award, the  Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS), selected Mullin as the recipient of the 2019 Esther J. Piercy Award. The award will be presented on Saturday, June 22 at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2019 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition in Washington D.C. The Piercy Award was established in memory of Esther J. Piercy, editor of the Journal of Cataloging and Classification from 1950 to 1956, and of Library Resources & Technical Services from 1957 to 1967. The award recognizes the contributions by a librarian with no more than 10 years of professional experience who has shown outstanding promise for continuing contributions and leadership in the areas of librarianship included in library collections and technical services.

Casey Mullin holds a Bachelor of Music degree in viola performance from Western Washington University, and a Master of Library Science degree (with music specialization) from Indiana University Bloomington. Prior to joining the Western Libraries faculty, he was Music Cataloger for the New York Public Library and Head of Data Control for the Stanford University Libraries. He is also an active performer (viola, violin and piano) and a published writer on music.