When I started asking questions it was at the very end of
the Cataloging Committee meeting on Thursday afternoon. Surveys are on my mind but I’m a bit hesitant
about how to do a survey. While I had a
bunch of music catalogers in a room, I figured I’d toss out my project idea and
ask for input, suggestions, questions, etc.
I didn’t want to take up time at this particular meeting at this
particular time (mostly because I still have too many thoughts swirling around
my head that haven’t coagulated into much of anything yet), so I just asked
that people find me over the next two days and we’ll talk.
An interesting thing happened though. As I approached people and started asking
questions about their recital and concert performance recordings, I not only
got several ideas, but it also raised more questions for me. This
is the great thing about conferences!!
A few things I now have written down include:
- Question: In our Archives department:
- Do they already hold anything related to recitals and concerts performed by School of Music students and faculty?? If so, what formats are they in?
- Can Archives store/house anything we currently have in the Fine Arts Library? For example, recordings older than a certain date? How about the programs, particularly after we get them all digitized?
- Question: Where are the masters of the concerts/recitals? The School of Music?
- Template: Someone told me that they have a template; it is a constant data file in OCLC. My idea was always to create a template in Voyager (our local ILS), but this sounded like a better idea.
- Pro: original record is added to OCLC directly (no importing records from Voyager)
- Pro: by using constant data, we wouldn’t have to redo or change a template if we were to move to a different ILS system
- Con: someone with access to OCLC would have to do the cataloging (this could also be a pro, depending on your perspective; for me, this wasn’t the plan, but plans can be changed)
- Question: Will we catalog recordings that no longer work? Cassettes that have deteriorated, CDs that no longer work, etc.
- Reminder: take pictures!! This came to mind as I talked with some people about how items are housed currently, the condition and preservation needs of items, and other preservation and archival issues I had not thought of yet. Some pictures of the current set up might be good to have if we end up changing some things for preservations reasons sometime down the road.
I think my next step is really to figure out what I want to
know from other institutions. I could
ask a bazillion questions, but that probably wouldn’t help me out much. I really need to focus my thoughts and figure
out what 2-3 issues I want to learn more about so I can create an appropriate
survey.
It has been a while, but at one time I had done a search on
the MLA-L archives and found posts from others who had queried the list
with questions about cataloging their recital and concert recordings. Those questions would be helpful to pull up
again. That’s really what I need to ask
about and put together all the answers into one place: one article or something that would be useful for the
next person who has the same questions.
This project seems to get bigger and bigger every time I
start thinking about it.
