As the semester comes to a close, I am starting to look back over the semester. Chuck and I have covered a lot of information – copy cataloging, original cataloging, authority records, authorized access points, how to deal with foreign language items, dissertations, online resources, and much more. We have also gone over readings and… Read more »

In other words – why is music cataloging important? Why do people specialize in music librarianship at all? I was talking to one of the librarians in public services the other day about being a music librarian. She told me that the music library here circulates more items than any of the branch libraries at… Read more »

Over the semester, I’ve used a lot of digital and physical resources, like the Manual of Foreign Languages or the M schedule of Library of Congress call number classification (both in digital and book formats). I’ve read through sections of the RDA Toolkit, explored Cataloger’s Desktop, become familiar with the Music Cataloging at Yale, as… Read more »

Earlier this week, a music librarian was showing me her collection of pins she had picked up from various library conferences over the years. My favorite was one that read simply, “It’s in the notes!” Nonsensical to non-catalogers, I suppose, but the notes fields (the 500 field, mostly) is a catch-all field for anything that… Read more »

One of the scores I am currently working on cataloging is a setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I Shall Not Live In Vain.” The poem is sung by a mezzo-soprano soloist, accompanied by a girls’ chorus, bells, and piano. While the soloist sings about not living in vain, the girls’ chorus primarily sings repetitions of… Read more »

This week, Chuck and I are cataloging dissertations. This is a new challenge for me on a number of levels, not the least of which is that a dissertation moves me from cataloging scores to cataloging books; and in some cases (like the first one we are working on), this is in fact a digital… Read more »

This past weekend I attended the Midwest chapter meeting of the Music Library Association in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois. If I’m counting correctly, I attended at least eleven sessions, not including the graduate student lightning rounds, poster session, or the tour of the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music. The presentations were on all kinds of… Read more »

LCGFT, otherwise known as the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (and definitely not about turkeys), is a thesaurus of authorized genre and form terms that is hierarchical in structure. This thesaurus came later than LCSH, or the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and many of the terms in LCGFT resulted… Read more »

It occurs to me that I didn’t do a great job of defining authority records previously–and even though a lot of what I do as a music cataloger is incomprehensible to non-catalogers, I thought I would record here a quote from Jean Harden’s Music Description and Access: Solving the Puzzle of Cataloging: “…information about the… Read more »

Since I’ve been working almost exclusively with Spanish and English documents in the last several years, I found myself surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) when confronted with scores in other languages. Very few of the scores so far have been in English, and have ranged instead from Spanish and Italian to Hungarian, Romanian, and… Read more »