Spreadsheet Nastiness: Your guess is as good as mine

In my last post, Half Way Plus, I happened to call the spreadsheet I am working on "nasty."  And I wasn't trying to be funny.  It really is rather nasty.  I'm sure people have had to deal with much worse, but this is by far the worst spreadsheet I have had the misfortune to work on.

The spreadsheet I am working from was pulled from an old, no-longer-supported database (File Maker Pro).  The information had been entered by student workers (I am assuming) just by using whatever they were given from the School of Music: the sound cassette tape and/or the program.  Yep, sometimes just the cassette tape, no program.  The info that was to be entered was pretty rudimentary: date, performers, composer, title, and notes.  From what I can tell, each of these categories was just one box and recordings were entered by work performed.  So for example, if a recital had four pieces on it, there are four entries in the database.  The notes would be repeated each time unless there was a note specific to one piece that wasn't applicable to the other pieces.

But sometimes, apparently, the information available wasn't very ... um ... comprehensive.  To put it nicely.  Check out this one recital:

"Who knows?"????  That's what someone entered under Performer?  And why is everything else in this same field as well.  Very weird, right?  But wait ... it gets better.

The composer field contains three composers as well as the weird note: "Your guess is as good as mine on this one."  This is the only entry for this recital, so instead of entering information for each piece on the recital, there is just one entry with all three composers listed together.  Obviously there was little to no info so I guess this was the only way to do it.  But really, you have to wonder what was going on in the person's head who was entering this info.

Finally, the last two fields:

Apparently no title was entered (how could there be??), the notes ended up there instead, and the notes field is just funny.  All this info was in the very first available field and then pieced out throughout the rest of the fields.  I don't understand why.  Was it a flaw in the database program being used?  Was it user error?  A combination of both?  Obviously there was some issue with the person doing the data entry, that goes without saying.

I have no explanation on this one.  I will have to actually go pull the recording to see if there is any way to decipher what this could possibly be.

Half Way Plus

First of all, I have to say that I had really hoped to make more use of this blog.  Here we are at the halfway point (well, a little past the halfway point) and this is only my ninth post.  Um, yeah ... things have been slow going.

So being that we are beyond the half way point, I really should evaluate where I am.

Number one on my Project List: Clean up the recital database.  Is this done?  No.  Is it much improved?  Yes!

• I have separated out all personal names from all corporate names in the "performers" column of the database.
• In the composer column I have cleaned up the vast majority of the names, fixed all the problem names that were in red (except for about 10) and blue, but decided to leave the problems that were in yellow and green (more on that later)
• In many places there was more than one name in the composer column.  I separated out all the extra people and have them all in their own columns.
• I started working on the Notes columns

What is still left to do:

• Create a spreadsheet of all the names that are not authorized (yellow) or uncertain (green) so they can be looked out at a future time.  This was bogging me down too much and i finally decided that I could spend the next three months fixing all these or I could skip it and get more work done in other areas.  Skipping it made the most sense.
• Authorize all the "other" names.  These are arrangers, transcribers, writers of lyrics, etc.
• Notes, notes, notes, and more notes.  I found this extremely time consuming when I started it and difficult to do.  I feel like I need to see the programs for each one or at least the recordings in order to  better organize the notes.  They really are a terrible mess!!

Number two on the list: Creating templates.  Not been done yet.  This is something that I feel confident will be easy to do once I get to a point where I'm ready to move the spreadsheet into MARC records.  Plus, I know someone at another institution who told me she has a template already.  Cooperative cataloging at it's finest!!

Number five on the list (yes, I know I skipped some): Survey.  I actually forgot that it was five on the list, but really my list isn't exactly priority order.  Well, maybe a little bit, but I have my reasons for skipping three and four.  I did finally take all my notes from when I was at MOUG and MLA in Dallas and transcribe the questions and suggestions I got from my awesome, supremely more intelligent colleagues and I'm ready to start reorganizing that list and editing the questions into a survey.  I have a reference question out to help with the "demographics" part and I have a list of colleagues I respect (paired down from 300+ to about 5) who I would like to ask to look the survey questions over and give me suggestions before I send it out.  So I feel like I've made progress here.

Number three: investigate digital possibilities.  Haven't done this yet.  This feels like just an intellectual exercise, which is the kind of thing I like.  The kind of thing that led my Master's thesis adviser to tell me that I'm a great researcher but not much of a wordsmith (thankyouverymuch).  So this is on the back burner for now.

Number four: Requirements for recital programs.  Also an item that has not been done yet.  But I have started thinking about it.  That's a start, right?

A little beyond the halfway point and this is where we stand.  I feel like I still have so much to do with this nasty spreadsheet!!  There is just still so much wrong with it.