Nancy Nuzzo Receives Exceptional Award from Music Library Association

BUFFALO N.Y. -- At its 2007 annual conference this month, the Music Library Association (MLA) presented its rarely conferred Special Achievement Award to Nancy Bren Nuzzo of Williamsville, director of the Music Library and Special Collections Library of the University at Buffalo. Nuzzo has been a member of the UB libraries''staff since 1980.

Outgoing MLA President Bonna Boettcher of Cornell University bestowed the award upon a surprised Nuzzo at the MLA 2007 Annual Conference, held earlier this month in Pittsburgh.

Boettcher noted that the award was instituted in 1992 but has been presented only seven times to those who provided "extraordinary service" to the profession of music librarianship over a relatively short period of time.

Boettcher said Nuzzo has been at the center of the association's transformation into an organization that is more professional in its day-to-day operations.

"As treasurer/executive secretary of the MLA over the last four years," she said, "Nancy established a number of sophisticated methods by which we are able to track investments and manage financial resources and human talent more efficiently and accurately.

"She is wonderfully organized and can get any discussion back on track no matter how convoluted it has become, Boettcher added, "and she remains rational and unbiased in virtually any circumstance, including those in which I know she has had strong feelings.

"It's always easy to come up with good things to say about Nancy," she said. "Her work with the association, and with me, over the years has been enjoyable and very productive."

Nuzzo served previously as editor of the MLA newsletter, chair of its publications committee, and as recording secretary for the association's board of directors.

She was named director of the UB Music Library earlier this year after serving as interim director since 1999 and continues to direct the university's double master's degree program in music librarianship, administered through the Department of Music and the Department of Library and Information Studies.

One of Nuzzo's principal academic interests is codicology, the study of a codex, an older handwritten book or manuscript. She has published in this field, which is closely related to palaeography, the study of handwriting in older manuscripts, and to philology, the study of language and culture in older texts.

She also is a musician in her own right, and has performed as a violist da gamba in many UB Music Department concerts.

Nuzzo received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Librarianship in 2001 and recently curated an exhibition of 16th- to 19th-century maps of Asia and the Silk Road in connection with the visit to UB of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.