A while back, when I still figuring out just how to deal with this spreadsheet a friend of mine volunteered to look it over with me. This friend is also a database manager, so of course I said yes!
One thing that was irritating me was that all the notes on all the recordings were squeezed into one field. It was not pretty. She asked me a few questions about how we catalogers make notes and then she worked some magic in Excel to split out the field. She used the period to plit it up. This was the best solution we could come up with for creating multiple fields and then all I had to do was move the info as I saw fit. Sounds great, right?
Well ... yes and no.
There are periods in many other places besides the end of a sentence. Initials in someone's name and abbreviations are two of the big ones I have run into. Dealing with them is tedious, but overall Istill do think that the cell split we did has its benefits. For one, it is easier to see all or most of the information.
Right now I am working on the notes. For the most part they consist of other performers on a recording: conductors, names of all members of a chamber group, soloists, other instrumentalists, the performers in major roles of an opera or concert of opera arias, etc. Occasionally I also have place of performance info or something else, but not often. Sometimes there is something in the notes area that I think is actually the title of the concert or recital. Those are nice to find, especially since I do not have titles (MARC field 245) on the vast majority of these concerts.
I've shared in the past how every work on a recital has the notes associated with it. That's a lot of repeated notes. But when a note only applies to one particular work, it is only listed next to that work. My method is to collapse all those notes into one line next to the first work listed on the spreadsheet. Easier said than done. I don't have a good method for dealing with those specific notes since I don't have the order the works were performed in. So instead of saying: harpsichord (1st, 3rd, and 4th works) and fortepiano (2nd and 5th works), I'm currently putting part of the work's title in the notes (enough for me to identify it). The plan will be to change that once I can get hold of either the program or the recording itself.
It's hard working off just a spreadsheet.
Here's a bit of an illustration of some of what I see:
In the above illustration there are five works performed on the recital on 10/19/1985 (all in bold). You will notice that the performer played these works on two different instruments. I should collapse the five lines that say Harpsichord and Fortepiano into one coherent note. Unfortunately the order of works here is most likely not the order of works as they were actually performed. I'll still get it all into one note, but it won't be pretty.
Same five works, further down the spreadsheet:
I apologize if this one is small and hard to read. This is info about the various parts of the individual pieces: keys and catalog numbers mostly. This is where the period caused a big split due to abbreviations. But also, how do I collapse all this into one note? (I'm thinking maybe a Contents 505 note, but then I have think about how I will create 505 Contents notes when we automatically create MARC records and will this get replaced by the titles of the works ... it sometimes makes my head hurt.) You can see some of the difficulty I am dealing with.
This is not an isolated incident. This is actually very common as I move along this spreadsheet. I've worked on the notes section before and given up. But now I'm back to it and really can't leave it again.
It must be done, so no time like the present!!
P.S. In other news, I have a survey done and it is being looked over by some colleagues for feedback. Hope to get that finalized
VERY soon!
