« the full horror of rock city (part 2) | main | I should just know this stuff »
Smiraglia, Bibliographic Control of Music
22 Jan 08
Smiraglia, Richard P. Bibliographic Control of Music, 1897-2000. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow P, 2006.
The bulk of this book consists of a chronological bibliography of bibliographic control of music materials, prefaced by the worthwhile if rather awkwardly titled article: “From James Duff Brown (1897) to Arsen Ralph Papakian (2000): An Essay on the Literature of the Bibliographic Control of Music.” Music has always been a special case:
Sound recording catalogers would argue endlessly about whether the whole item should be cataloged or whether it should be each work separately entered into the catalog. Given the structure of catalogs based on Cutter’s objectives (1876), this is not a surprise. The famous Rules for a Dictionary Catalog assumed a one-to-one correspondence between “work” and “document.” This, of course, has never been the case in music collections, where many copies and parts and varying scores of works were held; the problem was even more exaggerated in collections of sound recordings, where each work and every part of each work was held in multiple recordings of multiple performances. (6)
Smiraglia goes on to point out that a satisfactory model for representing the relationships involved has only recently been attempted, culminating in FRBR (1998). I’ve been thinking about FRBR for my own project, or at least entity relationships and database design. My first iteration will of necessity be simple, but FRBR is something to keep in mind. Smiraglia makes another interesting point regarding sound recordings:
Academic music librarians were concerned primarily with cataloguing and classification of the musical works represented on the recordings. But public librarians were mostly concerned with the arrangement of the recordings for browsing and circulation by the public. (8)
These two points blockquoted above dovetail for me. It seems as though both questions become somewhat moot in a digital age. Even in a library catalogue with brutal keyword searching and relevance algorithms, the inclusion of table of contents data makes the retrieval of a musical work from our sound collection relatively straightforward. Classification remains important for the browsing of the physical collection, but when the collection is digital browsing amounts to scrolling through lists (of links, of headings, of photographs). Two things then become important: the quality of the data, and decisions regarding how the data is indexed for searching and browsing.
Posted by pzed on January 22, 2008 at 10.43am
Categories: libraries, music
