Abstract: Smiraglia, Richard (1997). Describing Music Materials: A Manual for Descriptive Cataloging of Printed and Recorded Music..., 3rd ed.

Richard Smiraglia's manual is the long lost cataloging aid that I wished I had when I was learning AACR2 for the first time. Although the book is slightly dated (almost 10 years old now), and although some of the rules and LCRIs have changed since publication, Smiraglia's book is a great primer for learning about the steps involved in the process of describing an item and choosing access points for it. The book's strengths are in his ability to concisely provide lists of steps to take to accomplish a particular task. Take this list for example:

The steps in description of printed music are as follows:

1. Technical reading of the music, to determine the format and use of the item and to select the chief and prescribed sources of information;
2. Transcription of the title and statement of responsibility area from the chief source of information;
3. Consideration of transcription of data into the edition and material-specific details areas to indicate the presentation format of the music;
4. Transcription of the publication, distribution, etc., data, often found in several parts of the item;
5. Physical description of the music;
6. Transcription of series data;
7. Making notes as appropriate.

These helpful lists appear at the beginning of each chapter of the book, followed by detailed instructions and interpretations of each activity in the lists, followed by examples and a summary that concentrates the major points of the chapter into a few salient points to remember. This book was published before Cataloger's Desktop existed, and the tedious process of reading AACR2 for rules, then turning to the voluminous LCRI for interpretations of those rules made a book like Smiraglia's convienent for the cataloger, who could look in this source for both rules and LCRIs on most aspects of cataloging practice. While that type of convenience is superceded by links provided in Cataloger's Desktop, Describing Music Materials is still an important work for the beginning cataloger for providing a basic framework of cataloging practice, onto which the cataloger can build.

Abstract: Weitz, Jay (2004). Cataloger’s Judgment: Music Cataloging Questions and Answers from the Music OCLC Users Group Newsletter

Jay Weitz is one of the most respected catalogers for music, and has been responding to catalogers' questions in the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG) Newsletter since 1989. Many have noted his ability to communicate ideas succinctly and perspicaciously, tackling complex cataloging conundra, while maintaining an approachable, friendly, often witty tone. The book is designed to provide the cataloger with answers to many of the most persistent dilemmas faced by catalogers of music. It is arranged into topics, with questions on these topics arranged in reverse chronological order. Topics include "When to input a new record", "Sound recordings", "Main and added entries", "Titles", "Notes", "Subject Access", etc., and are further divided into subcategories under each. The editor acknowledges that many references in the questions and answers refer to outdated rules, dead websites, old forms of headings, bib and authority records that have changed, and old practices that have been superceded, but they have been included to provide historical perspective. Often the counsel Weitz gives doesn't change much over time, but other times new practices or rules change his advice. The reverse chronological order of the questions helps the reader find the most current answer quickly.

I met Jay at the last MLA meeting in Memphis. Ralph Papakhian invited me to lunch, and I ate at some greasy diner with Ralph, Jay, Mark Scharff and a few others. He was very nice and unassuming. While at that conference, I sat through my fair share of dry, esoteric presentations on cataloging. It amazes me to read through some of his answers because they explain hard concepts so effortlessly, and never seem stodgy or overly intellectual. I definitely plan on using this and his other work, Music Coding and Tagging: MARC 21 Content Designation for Scores and Sound Recordings, 2nd ed., as ready references in my work as a cataloger.

Abstract: Tutorials for Cataloger's Desktop and Classification Web

I'm not one for tutorials, but I thought I would give these two a try to possibly discover some of the less-obvious features available in these two cataloging utilities. Cataloger's Desktop is an online computer database produced by the Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service. It includes most of the resources needed for cataloging most media types. It includes online (and searchable) versions of AACR2, LCRI, LC Subject Cataloging Manuals, NACO Participant's Manual, MARC Standards, and more, including links to other important cataloging references online. I was already fairly familiar with Desktop, having used it extensively throughout my internship, and in my other jobs in cataloging. The tutorial was most helpful in creating bookmarks and notes for future reference, and for tailoring the desktop to include only the resources I frequently need in the rather long list of resources available.

As for the Classification Web tutorial, I found that there are many features of this site that I imagine I will never need to use. The tutorials weren't really helpful because they laid the jargon on pretty thick, forcing the novice cataloger to chew on thick syntax just to understand what the classification web site was tell you it was capable of doing. For seasoned catalogers, this would be less of a problem, but for those who do not have as much exposure to the lingo, it has proved off-putting, at least in my case. I use Classification Web mainly as a means of understanding the LC Classification schedule for M, ML, and MT. I check the LCC in an existing bib record I find in OCLC against the schedule to make sure I want to class an item in the same place or not. The other features of this resource could be important to others, however.

Update and plan

Well, I took a week off last week from my internship because Ralph was on vacation. I probably should have spent more time doing some literature abstracts, but it didn't happen. My cataloging prowess has increased, however, due to some inadvertent mistakes I made doing catalog maintenance two weeks ago. It all started when OCLC added a death date to the name authority record for Nino Rota, an Italian composer whose most notable work comes in the realm of film music. He did the score for The Godfather and a bunch of Frederico Fellini films. Anyway, he's dead, and the good people at OCLC updated the name authority record and all his name/title records, adding that death date. Well, our catalog didn't have these updated records, so I had the joy of updating them. This is more work than I realized, and became even more work after I learned that I had made a slight error in updating both the authority and bibliographic files.

It turns out I forgot to include a period at the end of the {100} and {700} name/title entries on the bib records because while a person is alive and has a birth date in the NAR, the dash at the end of the string of text requires that one leave off the period. Then, on the authority files, I forgot that rather than simply updating the name on each of the name/title records in our local ILS, I should have matched and loaded the updated name/title records from OCLC. Ralph got an email from the database managers in the main library on the day after I "fixed" Nino Rota, asking if I worked for the music library, and why I had thoroughly screwed up. Perhaps I exaggerate here, but I was certainly a little embarrassed. 128 updates later, however, and Nino Rota is fixed and ready to live out the rest of eternity in our ILS, death date updated on every record we have for him.

Unfortunately, I've gotten a little behind in my hours for this internship. I have 53 more hours to go, and lots of work still to do. I think I can do it before I go on vacation in mid August, so we'll shoot for that and hope for the best. I still have four or five literature abstracts to do, but those shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

Update: work and workshop

I didn't write a posting last week, but rest assured, I've been busy. Last week Ralph Papakhian and Sue Stancu hosted a cataloging workshop for music scores and sound recordings here at the music library. About 10 Librarians from all over the U.S. (and one from Canada) came to Bloomington to learn from the best. I was able to sit in on some of their sessions, eat some of the catered goodies brought in for the event, and solidify some of the more esoteric principles of cataloging. Particularly helpful were the sessions on formulation of title proper, uniform titles, and subject headings with free-floating subdivisions. It is in these areas in particular that music cataloging is so challenging.

I worked independently last week because Ralph was busy with the workshop. I actually got through a lot of scores, but now must wait to make sure I did them right before doing the final steps of bringing them into the local ILS, assigning a local call number, and preparing bindery instructions for them. One of the most challenging of these scores was a photocopy of a holograph by Motoyuki Takahashi, for which there was no record in OCLC. I did some original cataloging, creating not only a bibliographic record for the score, but also a name authority record for Takahashi, and a name-title authority record for the work. That was fun.

I've been working on a stack of books that has been on my desk since I started the internship, but with the work by Takahashi, I finished the pile. I tried to use an old list showing the items in our Frontlog (i.e. backlog that circulates) receiving the most use, but the items on the list receiving the most use were no longer in the Frontlog, having been cataloged sometime between now and the last time that list was made. So, I was able to arbitrarily choose some scores from the huge Frontlog. That was really fun; I chose some items that will give me experiences with facsimile editions, collected works items, non-roman scripts, technical manuals on music playing, some Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Stockhausen, and other interesting things. Ralph is also having me catalog some student doctoral and master's degree musical works. The second half of my internship should be full of good learning experiences.

Literature abstract: M. Charbonneau (2006), A White Paper on the Future of Cataloging at Indiana University.

My advisor sent this document to me, recommending that I take a look at what some of the catalogers at Indiana University identified as future trends in the cataloging world. Whereas none of their observations and conclusions surprised me, the general sense I took from their comments was that, as with other library jobs, the profession is in a state of flux, where current professional practices and the demands/needs of the library user may be diverging just at a time when budgets are shrinking and the workforce is aging. While one may argue that this has always been the case in academic libraries, the capabilities of technology and the changing research behaviors of students, scholars, and faculty are presenting new challenges and opportunities for catalogers.

As library budgets shrink and as new formats for information products and services abound, the task group writing the white paper found that the library will have to rely on the work of outside vendors to supply metadata that was once controlled by employees at individual institutions. They write:

Metadata in non-MARC formats from vendors, special collections librarians, and other types of cultural heritage institutions will increasingly be used to populate fields in MARC records rather than being entered locally at every institution... Better technological support for the cataloging process will assist catalogers in removing redundancies among and within institutions, allowing cataloging professionals to spend more time performing expert tasks.

These expert tasks include cataloging of uniquely-held items in special collections, but also in training to understand and use non-MARC metadata formats. I see this as an especially important aspect of the future of cataloging, because although the revision of AACR2 (called Resource Description and Access, or RDA) is coming, and promises to better accomodate digital resources, some resources will inevitably be best served using other metadata formats.

Finally, I was pleased to see that the paper mentioned some of the more innovative ways to easily enhance a catalog's bibliographic records through the inclusion of reviews, detailed contents notes (incl. tables of contents), and best of all, user-contributed "tagging" of resources. This last one has been effectively implemented on many of the new Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us in what amounts to voluntary subject heading assignment. While I don't really see this type of feature completely replacing the need for librarians who may assign controlled vocabulary subject headings, as a suplemental feature that easily satisfies most users, this could have a powerful effect on the way students especially use the library catalog. With a little control over some aspects of the bibliographic record, it is conceivable that students feel a sense of collective ownership of the catalog and responsibility toward fellow students to share knowledge by helping others access and retreive information resources. We'll never know unless we try it out, however. It remains to be seen just how deeply cataloging will be affected at Indiana University as a result of the observations in this white paper.

Library of Congress Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings--Music Sections

I've just finished reading through most of the Library of Congress' Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings for the creation of subject headings in music. Admittedly, this was not the most riveting of documents, and it took me three weeks to get through the music sections. I now understand the basics of assigning subject headings.

The primary concern is to provide at least one subject heading that represents the predominant topic of a work. Thus, the first subject heading should be as specific as possible in describing the work. Additional subject headings may be added to increase access. In MARC, there is a way to distinguish primary and secondary descriptors in a {650} field in the first indicator. However, both Ralph and Suzanne Mudge have told me that they do not ever use this indicator with subject headings. It makes me wonder, then, whether it really is all that important to make sure that the first subject heading represent the predominant topic of a work, because OPACs and ILSs search subject fields indiscriminately. I guess the lesson to take from this is the importance of creating subject headings that are as specific as possible.

I also learned about assigning free-floating subdivisions appropriately, such as "Arranged", "Excerpts", geographic, chronological, topical, and form subdivisions. These subdivisions have certain rules for use, and must be ordered appropriately. These rules are detailed in H 1160 of the Manual.

In regard to use of the "Facsimiles" subdivision, I read (and have had experience cataloging actual facsimile scores for this internship) that this subdivision is not applied to the primary subject heading, but in two added subject headings. The first is a generic heading for Music with free-floating subdivisions "Manuscripts" and "Facsimiles", in that order. The second is a subject heading for the composer, with the same two subdivisions added after the name. The example in H 1595 of the Manual looks like this:

650 #0 $a Organ music.
650 #0 $a Music $v Manuscripts $v Facsimiles.
650 #0 $a Bach, Johann Sebastian, $d 1685-1750 $v Manuscripts $v Facsimiles.

Finally, H 1917.5 descrbes music form/genre headings for medium of performance. There are complex rules governing the listing of instruments/voices for which a particular work was composed or arranged. This is complicated by use of genre designations that imply standard ensembles (a symphony is typically played by an orchestra, etc.), creating a number of situations where medium of performance is prohibited. With the huge variety of instruments, instrument families, and virtually endless possibilities for combining instruments and voices in new compositions, the rules quickly become complicated, and many exceptions must be noted. In the end, however, it isn't rocket science, and with some diligence one can read through the rules as needed in real-world cataloging.

Fake books, aleatory music, and Corelli

Well, its been almost another week, and I can hardly believe it. The summer is moving much more quickly than I anticipated. Its now almost July, and I've still lots of things I want to do with my summer. The cataloging internship is going well, however, and I feel that I'm learning a lot of useful skills for a future career in technical services.

I enhanced records for two fake books this week, both published by Sher Music. Technically called "real books", these volumes contain jazz and pop standards from mostly the early 20th century, providing melodies and lyrics with chord symbols that can be improvised by any ensemble. These were pretty straight forward, but I was able to find a complete contents list (each volume had about 200 songs in it) for each volume, which I dumped into a contents {505} note. This provided patrons with the ability to search for individual songs in the fake book, greatly improving access. Today I will go back and add a contents note to another volume already cataloged by our library.

The real challenge last week was a work by Leoncjusz Ciuciura, a Polish composer, who wrote many aleatory pieces in the Sixties. I cataloged his Spirale II, per uno e più. The subtitle for the work says that any set of instruments can be used for the work, but there were 14 scores included in the published work, all for specific instruments. The booklet of instructions for this work was 11 pages long, and although they had English translation, were virtually incomprehensible. To add to the confusion, a sheet designating certain words or sounds to be made by the performers in between two movements of the work was included as a loose leaf, and four color pictorial "ideograms" were included, but the instructions gave no explicit mention of how they were to be used. What a mess! In the end, the physical description {300} looked unique, to say the least.

Finally, I got some really good practice on uniform title creation with a flute quartet arrangement of two movements from some op. 5 sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli. The movements (a saraband and and a gavotte) were from different sonatas, and neither one had a uniform title with subfield p for section of work. Additionally, I think I'm coming to an understanding of the addition of "arr." to uniform titles and name-title authority records. That may sound silly, but it has been a bit confusing to me.

I've been looking around for positions at university libraries out West lately, and I've noticed a trend in job listings for technical services librarians. Many are now mentioning that it is preferred that candidates will have Dublin Core or other metadata understanding or experience. I think it important to learn more about this stuff to be prepared for the job market, although it falls outside the scope of this internship. Well, hopefully I'll post another entry soon.

Learning new concepts

Well, it seems like its been a long time since I last made a journal entry, but really there has been only one work day in between the last posting and today's. I've learned a lot since then, particularly on the following subjects:

1. Language Codes {041}: I've learned how to code this field to represent non-musical materials in scores, including translations, libretti, instructions for performance, sung or spoken text, table of contents, etc.
2. Varying Forms of Titles {246}: I've learned when it is necessary to include other forms of title information as added entries. For example, a title such as "Three bagatelles" should have added variant titles for "3 bagatelles" and "Bagatelles" so that the library patron can find the item regardless of the way he or she searches for it.
3. Performance Durations {306, 500, 505}: I've learned both the code field {306} and how to create an appropriate note for durations noted in scores. One thing in particular: when the item contains durations for multiple works, and a contents note {505 field} is included, the durations are noted with each of the works in the contents note. Otherwise, the duration is given a separate {500 field} note.
4. Creation of added analytical entries for personal names {700}: I cataloged an anthology of contemporary marimba music, for which none of the four pieces had name-title authority records. I learned how to research titles and represent my findings correctly on an authority record. We had to do a bit of searching on lots of Polish websites to find information about some of the composers. That was fun.
5. The difference between "1 score (27 p.)" and "27 p. of music" {300}: The difference is that a score is generally considered more than one performer's parts all in one staff, whereas works for solo instruments, including piano (which technically has two staves of music, or one "grand staff") and organ (which may have a grand staff plus another staff for pedals) use "p. of music".

Concerning this last subject, there has been some discussion on MLA-L recently to propose that AACR2 and the future RDA get rid of the "p. of music" designation entirely, and call all notated music a "score". I read through many of the arguments posted on the Listserv, and although many seem to be reluctant to throw out "p. of music" without a compelling reason, I think a compelling reason may be simplicity's sake, especially in light of the fact that RDA is supposed to simplify cataloging rules and practices somewhat. Perhaps something like "Notated music (27 p.)" would be a better descriptive term that skirts the issue of the technical definition of "score". "Notated music (27 p.)" could equally accommodate items that are entirely made up of musical material, as well as books that contain text and notated music (e.g., "lxvi, 55 p., notated music (27 p.)"). The one issue that remains would be a way to correctly note special types of scores (vocal score, miniature score, close score, etc.). Hmmmm.