David Day earned the PhD in musicology from New York University in 2008. He has worked as curator of music special collections at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah since January 1986. He taught the graduate research methodology course in the BYU School of Music for more than 36 years. He served in a variety of positions within the Music Library Association and the International Association of Music Libraries throughout his professional career.
Day is actively involved in a variety of music bibliography and music encoding projects. He maintains a website and database devoted to the bibliography of music and dance reference sources that lists more than 13,600 items approximately 2,200 of which are fully critiqued. He also maintains an index to more than 50,000 digital primary sources for research in opera and ballet. Recent accomplishments include electronic conversion of a dataset for more than 32,000 theatrical works performed in Paris in the 19th century. He is pursuing a bio-bibliography devoted to Jacques Brel.
He enjoys engaging students with the primary sources in the collection at BYU and other important collections in Europe. In the summer of 2023, he completed a six-week experiential learning project with four BYU students in which they photographed the entire collection of more than 1,600 comédie-vaudeville sets of performance parts from the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and selections of related materials found in Paris. In the summer of 2024, he is scheduled to undertake a similar project with students in Geneva Switzerland.