Coming to a Close ...

Not my desk, but the idea is close

... but not really.

Yes, the sabbatical period is coming to a close very soon, but this project will go on.  It has to, it is so far from being complete.  "Complete" being a relative term in librarian-ese.

For now, in my last week working on this project full-time, I wanted to give a quick update on where the spreadsheet stands.

Let's recap: the spreadsheet was a total of 10,123 rows of data.  Each row represented one specific musical work performed on a recital or concert recording.  Thus one particular recital or concert could be made up of anywhere from 1 row to 20 rows (or more in a few select cases).

In an effort to get a small portion of the work done and be able to do something with it, I ended up stopping my work at the end of 1989.  That gave me roughly 8 years of data (1982-1989).  The data is sporadic in the first few years, but 1986-1989 are pretty complete.

The years 1982-1989 represented 1,789 rows on the spreadsheet, 17.7% of the total.

I copied the years 1982-1989 over to a new spreadsheet so I could play with the data without messing up the entire spreadsheet.  In the new spreadsheet file I separated this chunk of years by "Student, faculty, & guest recitals" and "Ensemble concerts."  This allowed my to delete columns in one or the other that no longer applied to that chunk of data; for example, the 100 field from the Ensemble list and the 110 field from the Recitals list.

Recitals came out to 886 rows of data or 49.5% of the total of 1982-1989 data.  Ensemble concerts cam out to 903 rows of data of 50.5% of the total.  Pretty much an even 50/50 split.

I then went through the list one last time to put in more uniformity.  One of the problems with working on a large set of data over a long period of time is as you go along and get more experience you make decisions that you didn't think of earlier on in your work.  By the time I got the end I had a rhythm established and knew how I wanted things to look.  So going back to the top and revising one last time was important for me to have the uniformity across the data.  Especially as I consider making templates for future data.

The templates were constantly on my mind.  Things have to be consistent if you want to be able to create a template for someone else to use who doesn't have the experience and can't make cataloging decisions.

Thankfully, the process of going back over those 8 years of data went pretty quickly.  Having the data separated into recitals in one place and ensembles in another made a big difference, I didn't have to constantly switch gears.  And uniformity came much easier than.

Titles (245) were a big issue in the Ensemble list.  For some reason I had left this out all the way through.  But I came up with an easy solution and it didn't take long to stick titles in for each recording.

Programs are going to be an issue down the road.  Available programs were pretty much non-existent until around 1986, but remain sporadic until around 1988.  I did not request copies of every program, that would have been too time consuming, but did request one when the info in the spreadsheet was confusing or needed to be better sorted out.  Programs will have to be addressed at a later time.

Image source: MorgueFile