For the past several years, Orchestras Canada has been fortunate enough to receive funding to hire a summer student through the Ontario Ministry of Culture’s Summer Experience Program – and 2011 is no exception. For the second year in a row, we’re delighted to welcome Mike Romaniak, a recent graduate in composition and saxophone from the University of Toronto, to the OC team. And because of the generous support of Great West Life, we’re able to extend Mike’s stay with us to a total of thirteen weeks. Mike will be doing a number of things during his time with us, including:

• Revamping and updating our on-line Inventory of Orchestra Music Libraries, a resource valued by many of our smaller-budget orchestra members, whose librarians can use the Inventory to source music in the collections of peer orchestras across the country. You can find the IOML here.
• Renewing our collection of photos of member orchestras, so very useful in keeping our website homepage looking lively and attractive.
• Surveying our members, Orchestra News readers, Facebook and Twitter followers to learn more about their expectations of OC’s communications and information-provision initiatives. We put a lot of time and effort into Orchestra News, our website, and our social media initiatives – and we’d like to make sure that it’s time well-spent.
• Enriching and organizing the Resources section of the OC website.
• Working with sound recordings and the PowerPoint slides from the professional development sessions at OC’s national meetings to create on-line, dual-language learning modules accessible to all of our members. (Mike’s sound editing skills, honed through his composition studies, come in very handy!)

Speaking about his work this summer, Mike says, “it’s great to be back at Orchestras Canada! This summer, I’ll be striving to make our resources more accessible and convenient for our members.”

If you’d like to reach Mike, you can do so by phone at 416-366-8834 x223 or by email at mike@oc.ca.