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.