If the way everyone (except librarians) talks about the library is to be believed, and if established contract language is treated as the definitive record of what the job is (or is not, given how many CBA’s lack codified library language), you’d assume the library is a quaint, low-stakes corner of the orchestra. Picture this:

• A small room filled with ceiling high bookcases.
• A single desk.
• A mild mannered person in glasses with a pencil tucked behind their ear, ink stained fingers, and wearing paper cuts like quiet badges of honor. Their clothes covered in eraser shavings and paper bits, humming contentedly at midnight after the conductor emailed a fresh round of bowing changes and last-minute corrections 👀.
• Always dependable.
• Always smiling.
• Never needing rest. Or food. Or a bathroom break.
• Never saying no.
• Just a single person who is grateful to serve, and happy to remain overworked and invisible.

*Record scratch.*

The truth is that the performance library rarely resembles that fantasy (dependability, paper cuts, last-minute changes, and long days and nights notwithstanding). This is what it actually looks like, to name a few:

• One person doing the work of three in a regional orchestra (and often doubling in another role such as personnel or stage manager),
• 52-week libraries hustling from concert cycle to concert cycle without a safety net (or a vacation),
• Student labor performing detailed, high-skill music preparation work throughout the school year in music departments and conservatories, supervised by a single professional librarian—effectively subsidizing the choice made by these institutions to not hire and/or properly compensate trained performance librarians,
• Repertoire expanding and expectations multiplying while contract language remains stagnant (if it exists at all).

The circumstances may vary across the industry. The design, however, does not. This is what an unsustainable system built on invisible labor looks like.

In Article I (Re: The Library), I named the library’s work and exposed its minimization. In Article II (Re: Precedent), I traced the consequences of that minimization in one section across the CBA—revealing what happens when orchestras rely on librarians while operating within systems and structures that do not account for the work—and how it then spills into every other section in the bargaining unit. In this final article, Re: Design, I’m naming what should now be clear: the current way organizations structure, staff, and account for library work is unsustainable, and it must be redesigned to reflect the actual reality and workflow of the library—not the version that’s been convenient to write down, or worse, not accounted for at all simply because the work happens backstage where most people never see it.

Library work is musical work that is a fundamental part of the musician ecosystem. Playing musicians, committees, managements, local unions, and the AFM must come together to co-author—with librarians, not in place of them—the language, norms, and expectations that have quietly depended on invisible labor while the people performing that labor have absorbed the cost in silence and with fewer protections for far too long. Why? Because there comes a point where saying to your neighborhood friendly librarian “I’m sorry you have to deal with this” is no longer enough.

The work matters. The people doing it matter. And the systems should be designed with both in mind. This is not about personality, intention, the “spirit of the language,” or goodwill. It’s about functional, stable, and collaborative design.

Predictable Labor Should Not Rely on Exceptional People

Library work doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It moves with the season and the repertoire choices across those *insert length of your season here* weeks. Add in auditions, recordings, chamber music series, education programs, touring, pops shows, films, commissions, and special projects, and what you have is a season full of predictable workload spikes. For librarians, the timelines to navigate these spikes are non-negotiable. The work must be completed before downbeat of the first service otherwise rehearsals cannot run and concerts cannot happen. Programs are not postponed or canceled because the workload is unreasonable for the library. The expectation is that the library absorbs that workload backstage and makes it work anyway.

There is a difficult truth embedded in invisible labor: the more quietly librarians absorb risk, crisis, and ambiguity, the easier it is for the institution (and the people within it) to believe the system is working as designed. When every problem gets solved, every missing part magically appears, and every deadline is met through extraordinary effort, the organization learns a dangerous and false lesson: that the current structure is both appropriate and sufficient. That lesson soon spreads across the musical ecosystem—playing musicians assume the workload is reasonable, management believes the staffing and pay structure is adequate, orchestra committees conclude nothing requires urgent bargaining attention regarding the library, and the AFM reads silence as stability. The smoother the library makes the work appear by stretching beyond reasonable capacity to do it, the more the system teaches itself the wrong thing and then mistakes those lessons for truth. A system can only learn its own limits when the people propping it up stop carrying those limits in silence. When nothing ever breaks, systems never learn where they are weak. And what systems don’t learn, they don’t bother to account for.

This creates another consequence: it takes work that is already largely out of sight and removes it even further from how an organization accounts for its own success (what it tracks, what it values, what—and who—it chooses to remember). Librarian work happens out of sight but that isn’t the issue. The issue is what the system (and each person who relies on library labor) does with that reality. “Out of sight” quickly and easily becomes “out of mind,” even though the outcome of the work is clearly visible. This makes it easier to separate the labor from the results—to take the outcome and not recognize the work and effort behind it. Over time, that lack of recognition morphs into erasure. The work is counted but the role isn’t named and the people aren’t included, even as the results are celebrated and applauded.

When everything works the way it’s supposed to, the applause goes where it always goes: to the musicians on stage. When a difficult piece comes together flawlessly, the conductor stands in front to receive the ovation (and the literal and figurative flowers), and shares them with the colleagues in view. When awards are announced, donations celebrated, seasons praised, and milestones marked, the recognition follows the same well-worn path: toward what can be seen, and toward the faces attached to the performance.

Staff, crew, managers, senior administrators, and production colleagues are thanked by name—in speeches, post-concert toasts and parties, press releases, social media posts, donor events, and at year-end celebrations—and they deserve every word. Yet the work and names of the librarians are rarely mentioned, let alone named. The labor that ensures every note on the stand is playable, accurate, and legal is absorbed into the outcome and disappears from the story. The better the library performs its work, the more invisible its contribution becomes. When it’s all said and done, the organization celebrates the visible labor and benefits from the results of the invisible labor, without recognizing that one makes the other possible.

Operational risk flows toward the library while artistic reward flows away from it. When everything goes right, the system behaves as if no one had to make it that way. As if it just happens on its own. However, when anything goes wrong, the cracks are exposed immediately and suddenly everyone remembers there’s a library and expects it to absorb the problem and fix it. No other section in the orchestra carries that disproportion of risk and recognition. Everyone knows exactly what comes next when something is amiss onstage during rehearsal because it’s practically Pavlovian at this point: “librarian to the stage, please.”

It is in those moments that the library becomes the repository of every unsolved mystery, every missing piece of music that someone left at home, and every invisible handoff. The same group of individuals that act as shields to risk also absorbs the blame when anything—bowings, editions, markings, late commissions, doublings, page turns, incomplete programming for a concert, inserts, you name it—is wrong, perceived to be wrong, inconvenient for someone else, or the result of someone else not doing their job earlier in the pipeline. And because the library is trained to protect the process, librarians are expected not only to fix whatever has gone wrong, but to also accept the blame for it and apologize, even when the root cause sits far outside their office.

The library is simultaneously made the scapegoat and expected to be the savior: blamed first when anything goes wrong or someone else didn’t do what was expected of them, then expected to prevent anything from going wrong in the first place, catch whatever falls, and repair whatever breaks. The librarians are expected to own the fall and produce the solution no matter where the fault line began (which almost never begins in the library to begin with). Librarians shouldn’t have to bleed so organizations can pretend nothing is broken. Quiet heroics make for great folklore, but terrible policy. 

What Comparison Shows

If you’ve seen one orchestra or organization struggle to resource the library, you’ve seen them all. The annual budget may span the gamut. The season length may vary. The title, staffing model, and classification of ensembles may change. But the pressure points are identical. The only difference is the shape of the squeeze:

• A one-person shop drowns almost immediately. Every task funnels through a single set of hands. The organization gets a full pipeline (acquisitions, editing, bowings, rentals, markings, scanning, logistics, and crisis response) through one person, without backup or protection. The cost is paid in unpaid overtime, energy, and the quiet hope that illness, injury, and burnout wait until June.
• A fully staffed library at a larger institution drowns more slowly. Repertoire turns over faster, timelines compress, and special programming stacks on top of the standard workflow. Films, pops, media, collaborations, tours, commissions, operas, ballets, and education initiatives do not replace core programming—they multiply it. Even with multiple librarians, the workload expands faster than staffing grows. These orchestras burn out their experts over decades rather than months.
• In academic and training institutions, librarians often support multiple ensembles simultaneously, sustaining continuous music preparation with nominal help from student workers who rotate, graduate, and learn on the fly. Continuity, accountability, and professional judgment remain with one role—the librarian—even though the visible headcount appears larger.

Same pattern. Different wallpaper. Same design flaw: The work required to get the music on the stands exceeds what contracts and job descriptions recognize. Instead of leadership adjusting the agreement, the planning model, or staffing, the gaps get absorbed by the people already doing the job. Workload growth becomes an exercise in endurance, and that becomes expectation. That expectation then hardens into obligation without a single amendment to the contract, a job description, the staffing, or the pay. The miracle librarians pull off today becomes the expectation (and the job) tomorrow.

A real fix starts when exhaustion, marginalization, and compensation shaped by assumptions about the job are no longer treated as part of the work, but as evidence that the system itself is—and has been—wrong.

The Work Has Outgrown the Framework

The orchestra of 2026 is not the orchestra of 1996, and while CBAs have slowly evolved in many areas to reflect that shift, the library was never brought fully into that evolution. In most agreements, librarians appear primarily as headcount (x musicians + x librarians: a contractual shorthand that erases the section from the very musician body it belongs to). Where language does exist, it tends to be limited, inconsistent across the field, and silent on scope, workload, boundaries, or protections. Meanwhile, the work has changed dramatically, leaving librarians with 21st-century responsibilities operating inside a 20th-century framework.

What used to be “special” weeks and one-off concerts are now standard business.

Films, gaming soundtracks, multimedia collaborations, operas in concert, world premieres, rewrites delivered hours before the first concert (and sometimes after the first concert), 21-chart pops books that need to be built from scratch, and runout community programs that require a full production pipeline are no longer outliers. They’re the 25–26 season and all land in the lap of the library. And it’s all happening at once. The work hasn’t just increased. It’s changed form.

It now spans score construction, part creation, formatting, verifying editions, clearing rights, scanning (*rolls eyes*), and problem-solving at a speed that doesn’t match the assumptions baked into older structures. None of this lives in the margins anymore. It’s the center of the job. Titles and job descriptions written for a narrower artistic landscape are now expected to stretch to cover every new idea, every new initiative, and every programming ambition without additional time, compensation, staffing, or acknowledgment that the ground has shifted.

If the organization’s to-do list continues to get bigger and the programming continues to expand as a result but the structure stays exactly the same, the difference has to come from someone, somewhere. Right now, that is the librarian. They are absorbing that through time, skill, stress and more invisible labor. To use a larger metaphor here as it relates to our current musical landscape: it’s akin to wanting a bigger, fancier house with all the bells and whistles but using the same foundation and working the existing contractors harder instead of hiring more to do the work properly and safely.

Perfection Without a Safety Net

Librarian work is nothing but details and with the sheer volume of repertoire that flows through a season, one tiny miss can ripple across an entire program. So, librarians learn to live in perfectionist mode. Not because we’re wired that way, but because the job and culture demands it. Over time, perfection, speed, and quiet heroics stop feeling extraordinary and simply become the baseline everyone expects from the library. When every week is stacked with core rep, premieres, films, future planning, auditions, budget deadlines, practice part pulls, and whatever else gets thrown in the mix, it’s inevitable that something falls through the cracks and a periodic mistake is made.

These mistakes don’t happen because librarians are careless, inattentive, or unprofessional. They happen because the library is the choke point through which every piece of information, every change, every deadline, and every emergency must pass. When there are too many spinning plates and not enough hands, one of them will drop and often the only surprise is that more don’t. Yet the response rarely reflects that reality.

Instead of being met with grace, librarians are often met with scolding tones, lectures, or condescension, and the occasional raised voice, as if the librarian somehow forfeits basic human fallibility simply because they are librarians.

Meanwhile:

• a conductor forgetting to communicate a change is excused,
• someone accidentally playing during a rest is laughed off,
• programming chaos is called artistic excitement,
• last-minute decisions by others are framed as “part of the job.”

Everyone else’s humanity is granted automatically and grace is extended. The library’s is treated as a breach of contract that needs a pound of flesh to be taken as payment for the transgression. This system that relies on librarians to absorb everyone else’s mistakes is the same one that refuses to extend the same grace back to them. If the only way the organization holds together is for librarians to be flawless under impossible conditions, then the design is what failed and is failing, not the people doing the labor.

Optional Expectations Treated as Mandatory

There’s also a whole category of library labor no one talks about or recognizes: the favors that aren’t actually favors (they are requests that land like obligations):

• A conductor wants a set of bowings or parts for a program at another institution they’ve been engaged to conduct at.
• A player has a concert next month with their chamber group and needs help finding a specific piece.
• An audience member writes asking about a piece they heard in the fall of 1972 that the the music director conducted and they don’t remember the name or the composer, but they’re pretty sure it begins with a Z (in reality it was in the spring, not the music director, and it was a Beethoven piece conducted by someone with a Z in their last name…)
• Development wants to offer a “quick” library tour and talk to a potential donor on Friday after the concert but you have a private engagement you need to get to right after the concert ends.

Somehow, all roads lead to the library to “help.” No one writes this into the CBA and it’s not included in the job descriptions. It’s simply assumed and treated as “perks” of employment. Many behave as if the library exists on standby for anything adjacent to music-making (internal, external, formal, informal, or just a good idea someone had in the car or saw on YouTube). This is exactly how favors slowly become expectations, and expectations quietly become requirements. Some labor is “optional” only on paper. Choice disappears when saying no carries reputational, relational, or political cost and the work is no longer a favor—it’s obligation with no acknowledgment, protection, or ability to say no. Librarians want to help—it’s part of the work and the pride of it—but access to that expertise is not unlimited or automatic or unpaid. No one is owed free library labor on demand. Moreover, librarians are allowed to have agency and set boundaries around requests unrelated to the organization’s scheduled seasons and artistic operations.

Out of Sight, Out of Contract

Librarians have long been trained into invisibility. Silence is inherited, culturally rewarded, and often mistaken for ease.

Part of the difficulty lies in a persistent mythology about library work—an inherited narrative in which librarians are imagined as quiet custodians, working in isolation, executing simple tasks handed down from the past. This story is not just inaccurate; it actively undermines librarians’ authority and training as musicians. When colleagues believe they already understand the job—and that understanding is wrong—librarians are forced not only to advocate, but to correct the record before they can even be heard.

For more than a century, orchestras quietly reinforced a two-tier dynamic between playing musicians and librarians: players are treated as talent to be accommodated; librarians as service workers to be corrected. That legacy echoes everywhere: correcting musicians feels like overstepping; correcting librarians feels safe—a habit born out of hierarchy, not truth. And that spills into rehearsal rooms, inboxes, personal interactions, and multiplies exponentially when stress hits the room.

And in that environment, it isn’t surprising that librarians default to silence. The silence is a result of learning the cost of correcting the record in real time. So yes, telling librarians to “speak up” is fine, but it is not a solution. Librarian voice alone cannot be the system so that advice only works if the people with power are prepared to listen and respond to those voices. In a unionized environment, that power does not just sit with management. It also sits with the bargaining unit members who shape what gets normalized, defended, ignored, or bargained for.

When librarians state what they need to do their jobs with dignity and respect—or point out language that fails to protect them—the response cannot be dismissiveness, deflection, or assumptions about the role from those without direct experience of it. Listening is part of the work and the needs being expressed should not be minimized or bargained down. Convenience is not the standard for what is reasonable. The work is. There is something deeply wrong when the people most affected by unreasonable workload, chronic understaffing, and structural invisibility are expected to repeatedly justify why they deserve sustainable working conditions and fair treatment in the first place. At some point, the burden cannot remain on librarians to endlessly translate, explain, advocate, and absorb. When others step up alongside librarians in this advocacy, the system itself becomes clearer. The workload becomes more visible. The pressure points become easier to recognize. People begin to understand just how much orchestral stability has been maintained not through sustainable design, but through continuous library intervention and heroics.

Representation, Authority, and the Duty to Understand

A bargaining unit cannot function equitably if entire sections of the orchestra are represented primarily through assumption or outdated ideas about what the work is. Committee members and union officers do not just represent the musicians and jobs they understand personally. They represent the entire bargaining unit. That responsibility does not disappear simply because a role or section is less visible, less familiar, or easier to overlook.

One doesn’t need to be a percussionist to understand that two players cannot reasonably cover all the instruments in Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Nor does one need to be a string player to recognize that a Brahms symphony cannot sustain the intended sound with a Mozart-sized string section. The same principle applies to the library. One does not need to have won or held a library position to understand that there is a tremendous amount of work happening between repertoire being programmed and music appearing in a folder ready to be played. The only difference between the library examples and the ones above is that most people only encounter the final results of librarian labor, not the process that made it possible.

Representation cannot and should not stop at familiarity. The responsibility of those representing the bargaining unit is to ensure that no section becomes (or remains) structurally sidelined simply because its labor is less visible to the rest of the orchestra. As a principle: The duty is not “Represent what I know;” the duty is “Represent everyone, whether I understand their job yet or not.”

The Role of the AFM and Contractual Coherence

At the federation level, this becomes a question of whether agreements are evolving at the same pace as the work itself. Orchestral programming has changed dramatically over the last 25 years and library labor changed right alongside it. The difference is that much of that evolution never made its way into contract language. So, the gap between what the job actually is and what the agreement currently recognizes gets absorbed by librarians and negotiated in real time by local unions and orchestra committees.

In practice, the field has largely been left to sort this out orchestra by orchestra. One bargaining unit builds protections through custom language. Another relies on institutional memory. Another borrows language from a different orchestra and attempts to retrofit it onto an entirely different institutional culture. Another quietly expands the scope of the role without adjusting compensation, staffing, workload expectations, or the legal realities surrounding elements of library work (looking at you, scanning 👀). Much of this happens because librarians are not always present in the rooms where these decisions are being made, leaving library conditions to be shaped around assumptions about the work rather than direct understanding of it.

Every bargaining unit should negotiate language that reflects the realities of its own institution and library but it should also be remembered that no group is negotiating in a vacuum. Orchestras—musicians and managements alike—watch one another and we should remain mindful of that. The existence of language in a CBA at one organization does not necessarily mean it was the product of meaningful library participation, nor does it automatically mean the resulting terms reflect the realities of the work, comply with laws specific to elements of library work, or solve the actual problem librarians articulated. When language becomes codified, it can easily be mistaken for consensus, reasonableness, or best practice.

That is why these decisions around the library deserve care. Language has a way of outliving the specific circumstances that created it. A compromise made for one orchestra can, and often does, become a precedent for the industry, and before long, language written to solve a local problem is being treated as evidence of how the job should function everywhere else.

The current challenge is not imposing unilateral uniformity across the industry. Every orchestra has different artistic demands, institutional cultures, and operational realities. At the same time, there are certain principles that should not vary simply because the librarians happen to work behind a closed door in a different part of the building. The opportunity, however, is for the field to develop language that remains responsive to local needs while staying grounded in the realities of the work itself.

This is where the AFM, local unions, bargaining committees, and legal teams have a responsibility to bring greater coherence and clarity to how library labor is recognized across the field. Not because librarians are asking for special treatment, but because the current patchwork of a system is too dependent on invisible labor, improvisation, and luck. Agreements are supposed to stabilize labor conditions, not exacerbate them. Right now, too much of library stability still depends on us librarians absorbing the instability quietly backstage.

And So, Plainly: The Library is a Section

Orchestras intuitively understand what a section is. Woodwinds are a section. Brass is a section. Percussion is a section. None of them are treated as optional. None of them are invisible when the planning gets uncomfortable. None of them function without expertise, preparation, and meaningful input into the artistic product.

The library belongs squarely in that category. It is a performing section whose work is embedded in every bar the ensemble rehearses and performs. It carries jurisdiction, authority, and responsibility that are inseparable from the unit’s artistic outcome—not a parallel service that happens somewhere adjacent to the stage.

And because we have tiptoed around saying this for decades, let’s finally say it: the library is not a concierge desk, a last-minute emergency room, a 24-hour print shop, or an elf-run workshop where music magically appears by your chair. It is not a customers-always-right counter at Home Depot, and it is not Burger King—you cannot always “have it your way.” It is not where unsolved problems go so someone else can turn them into solutions.

It is a section.

This means its work belongs inside the same structural protections, planning assumptions, respect, and compensation that every other section of the orchestra is afforded—not outside them.

The library is a section, not a servant—and it’s well past time that our CBAs and orchestral culture reflect that.

In Solidarity,

Nicole Jordan, Principal Librarian

The Philadelphia Orchestra

P.S. While this article series centers library labor, the framework applies anywhere a job is essential yet structurally sidelined. Small sections. Doublers. Subs. Non-titled players. Any colleague whose contribution is assumed rather than explicitly valued. If you recognize your own experience in these pages, that’s not an accident—it’s the same system, wearing a different hat.