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 While that type of convenience is superceded by links provided in Cataloger's Desktop, Describing Music Materials is still an important work for the beginning cataloger for providing a basic framework of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.