Midwest, MLA Meeting, 2011

This weekend, Oct. 27-29, 2011, I attended the Midwest chapter meeting of the Music Library Association.  It’s always such a fun meeting.  It’s like attending a mini-MLA national meeting.  While attending this meeting I started talking to my colleagues about my upcoming sabbatical project.

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 was surprised at the number of people that told me they wanted to know more about what I was doing or how my project goes and what I did, etc.  Several others have a variety of issues and levels of cataloging (or non-cataloging) of their recital and concert recordings and are curious to hear more about this project.

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.