In the Home Stretch

I can't believe this sabbatical time is almost to a close.  In a little less than three weeks I will be back at work and any further work on this project will become just a small part of my regular job again.  There is SO MUCH work that still needs to be done!!  I've done a lot but a lot more could be done.

Here's a quick summary of what I have tackled and hope to accomplish in the next few weeks.

The largest part of the project has been the database itself.  This is the main instigator of doing this project in the first place.  I have handled all the composer names and cleaned up a lot of other names (performers, arrangers, etc.) throughout most of the database: composers are done all the way through; other names are semi-done.

Currently I'm working through the notes, which has been way more of a headache than I anticipated.  But in the last few weeks I've gotten into a rhythm with those.  Basically I am taking all the notes and getting rid of duplicate information and condensing all the note info onto one line for each recording.  This is in contrast to the current set up where the notes appear on every line.  I had originally thought that they were all duplicates and that all I had to do with delete all lines but one and then arrange them appropriately into the columns I had established (general note, performers note, location note, etc.).  What a silly assumption!  Many of those lines of notes were specific to the piece that line represented.  So this is what I have done:

• Find something in the notes section that can be or seems to represent a title for the whole recording and cut and paste it into the title column.  Delete all other instances of that title.
• Move all performers into one line regardless of which pieces they do or do not perform on.  IF a program is available, designate which pieces individuals perform on within that note.  List each name or group once and delete all other instances of the name.
• Move any other general notes into a general note field.  Delete all other instances of that note.
• If a program is available create a time and place note (518) for the performance and recording.
• If there is a note on a student recital regarding the recital being "in partial fulfillment of" a certain degree type, put it in a general note.  Delete all other instances of the note.  [May reconsider moving these notes to a 502 note later, for now keeping them general (500) notes.]
• Delete notes made that are typically not used in MARC records for sound recordings.  In other words, if it doesn't fit, delete it.  [This was a really hard concept for me at first.  Delete information??  But something had to give and there were many instances of extraneous info.]

Right now my goal is to finish working on these notes through 1989 (I'm almost there) which will give me 8 years worth of recordings to play with in MARC format.  I am then going to copy and paste those 8 years into a new spreadsheet.  Once I have a new spreadsheet for them I will create two tabs and separate the recordings by recitals in one tab and large ensemble concerts in another tab.  For the most part every recording fits one of those two categories, exceptions are few and I can put those where they best fit.   Once I have them separated in this way, I can customize a few things that are specific to those types.  I should be able to complete all of this by the end of this week.  Next steps will be to finally move the info to MARC records.

The second part of my project was to create templates for future recordings.  I don't think this will be difficult to accomplish.  Especially with all the work I have done so far, I can see much more clearly what information we even have for these recordings and how I have been dealing with that info.  I think now that I have this experience, creating the templates won't be too hard.  That is unless I decide to create templates in RDA format (which makes the most sense, unfortunately).  Even then though, I don't think there would be too many differences.

Third part of the project was the digital side.  I have a proposal in my head for digitizing the programs and linking them up with the finished MARC records in our local catalog.  I haven't yet explored the possibilities of digitizing the sound.  Sometime in the next couple weeks I want to get my hands on some of the articles written about the Variations project at Indiana and maybe talk to someone who was heavily involved in that project.  I need to find out who else is doing something similar.  What I don't know is if they are digitizing recitals or not.  I'm not interested (at the time) in digitizing our regular sound collection.

Researching requirements of recital programs (the fourth aspect of my project) has also not happened.  The first part of this project really was very time consuming!  This is something I REALLY want to do though.  I know the approach I want to take with this, but haven't been able to devote the time to it yet.

Finally, surveying other institutions on their cataloging practices regarding recital and concert performances at their institutions.  I have put together a survey and I sent it out to a few colleagues just for feedback.  I have received that feedback and made a few changes, but I need to make more based on that feedback.  But then I stopped short on actually setting it up as a survey (I originally thought I'd get a survey out before the end of May).  Reason being is that I put together a short survey for a personal project and realized in that process that how I wanted to set up this survey wasn't going to work the way I wanted it to.  Plus it occurred to me that the university may have guidelines that need to be followed in doing surveys for research and since I want to eventually publish an article with the information I gather, I need to investigate further.  Plus, maybe the university has a survey tool that I could take advantage of that would be better than the free tools I have been using online for other projects.  So this aspect of my project has started to look bigger than I anticipated.

So that's where I stand right now.  In the last month of this project I am looking back at the project overall, what I have accomplished, what I know I can get done in the remaining three weeks, and what still needs to be done and I wonder if this project was too big from the beginning.  I knew it was going to be a lot (and one aspect was added by my superiors {part 3--researching digitization possibilities} so that wasn't even in my original plan) and it has proved itself so.

It probably didn't help that we sold a house, bought a house, and moved during my sabbatical.  That probably cost me about a month of time.  But other than that I have worked pretty regularly most every day.  I do feel like I have accomplished a lot and I know this database far better than I ever did.  If I can make MARC records of the first 8 years of the database and get templates established for creating MARC records from 2012 forward, that will be a big boost to what was there before.  And I will know how to deal with the years 1990-2004 and everything added since 2004 in a much more efficient way.

Fun with Notes

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!