Sorting/classifying sheet music

Today I spent several hours sorting through a box of assorted sheet music. It was a good exercise for several reasons: it was good for me to just see different pieces of music from a variety of publishers on a variety of subjects, and it was a good way to start thinking about classification and where things fit. It was really tricky, and I can see why music librarians tend to put off dealing with sheet music! As I was sorting through these things and trying to figure out what categories they would best fit in, I tried to think about why these things would be used and by whom. I think part of the problem is that we don't always know how something will be used. I'm sure there are guidelines out there as to what sheet music publishers, composers, etc. are the most "important," per se, but there's just no way to tell what someone might eventually find useful. Useful for one person could be completely useless for someone else. I imagine that the same questions come up when trying to decide what is "worth" digitizing. I guess this is why it's always important to keep the user (and potential user) in mind when making these types of decisions. When it comes to archives, though, it seems that the general concensus is just to digitize everything.

In a similar vein, after reading Krohn's "On classifying music" article (citation is in my last post), I'm not sure that modern music librarians would agree wholeheartedly with his idea that it is "the duty of every music librarian to amass a sizeable collection of sheet music" and that they should, "by hook or crook," attempt to acquire any and all local collectors' collections. He was concerned about the fact that many collectors tend to separate the cover art from the music, but it's important to keep the piece intact in order to get all of the relevant information about it.

I think there has been a realization that sheet music can be useful to researchers of all types of sociological, societal, historical, and other subjects. As Krohn says, "They [the collections] are an expression of the growth of culture in American civilization and are of more importance historically than musically." Brad said today that there is a lot of important sheet music out there, important for both musical and other reasons, but there is also some that may not have as much musical value, or perhaps not much value today at all. How does one determine value, musical or other?

One interesting thing I discovered while looking at several digitized sheet music collections was that I really like to be able to browse by subject, whatever thesaurus or list is being used for subject access. It's good to know exactly what terminology is being used up front, rather than having to figure it out and guessing which terms will be used. LC's Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mussmhtml/mussmhome.html) collection has a nice index of subjects used that one can browse through. Another interesting thing I discovered with the 19th Century California Sheet Music Project (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~mkduggan/neh.html) was that they separated out and classified the cover images separately than the music subjects. One can browse Image Subjects (they used LC's Thesaurus of Graphic Materials) or Music Subjects (using LCSH, as far as I could tell). Being able to browse by subject of the cover art is of great help to those whose interest in these sheet music collections is primarily because of the covers.

Back to organizing/classifying... There will always be pieces that don't fit into any obvious categories (do they just go in an "Other" or "General" category?), and also pieces that fit into several categories. If if they're being housed by category, though, one can still assign multiple subjects to one piece of music. You'd just need to come up with a "main" category for it to be housed with.

Later this weekend I'll browse through Krohn's Music publishing in St. Louis book and post some more...

Hours today: 4
Total hours completed: 8

Introduction to the collection

Sat. May 20, 2006 (Normally I'll try to write these up on the day I complete the hours, but I got a little behind this week...)

Today Brad introduced me to the various parts of the sheet music collection, told me some of the history of how the various parts were acquired, and let me take some time to poke around in the collection on my own to see if I could find a section of it to concentrate on for my project. He also gave me a copy of Ernst Krohn's Music Publishing in St. Louis (completed and edited by J. Bunker Clark, 1988) to look through. Brad also mentioned an article that would be good to read - I'll put the citation here so I don't forget to look for it: Krohn, Ernst. "On classifying sheet music." Notes XXVI/3, March 1970.

This is a quote from Gaylord's Supplementary Catalog information page (http://catalog.wustl.edu:81/screens/libinfo.html):

The Gaylord Sheet Music Collection is an amalgamation of several discrete collections. Most notable are the St. Louis publishers' collection included in the Supplementary Catalog; the part of Ernst Krohn's collection indexed in George Keck's dissertation, Pre-1875 American imprint sheet music in the Ernst C. Krohn Special Collections, Gaylord Music Library, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri : a catalog and descriptive study (1982); the popular song collection indexed by Betty Krause on cards and now part of the Gaylord Card Catalog housed in the Microforms Room (Room 12b); the "green box collection" of vocal and instrumental music, organized by genre and composer and cataloged by collection-level records under composer; and, the Eric P. Newman collection, currently not indexed.

I asked Brad what had been the priorities for cataloging and digitizing thus far, and he said there were three groups of things that had been prioritized thus far and all for different reasons: 1) the St. Louis publishers collection, particularly Balmer (most important 19th c. St. Louis music publisher) - for obvious local interest reasons, 2) the World's Fair material - for programmatic/subject interest during the centennial celebration of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, and 3) the newspaper boxes (newspapers once had pieces of sheet music inserted) - for preservation reasons since many of the pieces were starting to deteriorate.

Krohn had his sheet music collection organized/classified using his own subject terms. The collection, for the most part, is no longer organized this way (though there are a few sections still boxed this way), but the terms are entered in the bibliographic records in the Supplementary Catalog as "Krohn term." Some examples of these terms include Presidents, Patriotic, States, Hawaiian, World War II, St. Louis World's Fair, etc.

The parts of the collection that interested me the most are the World War I boxes (Brad mentioned that a musicology student recent wrote a paper using this part of the sheet music collection, which I think would be quite interesting to read), the St. Louis music publishers, and the Newman collection. In terms of digitization priorities, continuing on with the St. Louis music publishers (especially the Balmer) would make the most sense. They are all cataloged to some extent, though, so the cataloging experience wouldn't come in as much with this part of the collection (though I could still look at cataloging procedures and possible enhancements and other changes...).

The World War I boxes would be interesting, but there are several big World War I sheet music collections already digitized, so there could be quite a bit of unecessary duplication if I chose this portion (or maybe I shouldn't really be concerned about that?). I started to do a spot check of titles we hold with several of the big collections that are already digitized (primarily Brown's World War I Sheet Music Collection - http://dl.lib.brown.edu/sheetmusic/ww1/index.html and Duke's Historic American Sheet Music - http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/) and found some overlap, but I didn't do enough to really be able to make a final decision.

In terms of cataloging experience, doing some of the Newman collection would probably make the most sense. Compared to some of the other parts of the collection as a whole, I don't think this is really seen as a priority for digitization, though.

Maybe I could choose different parts of the collection to work on for different purposes? Maybe that's making things too complicated and being too amibitious..

Hours today: 4
Total hours completed: 4

My proposed learning plan

I am proposing to work with a portion of Washington Univ. in St. Louis Gaylord Music Library’s sheet music collection. Site supervisors will be music cataloger Mark Scharff and music subject librarian Brad Short.

Specific activities will include initial orientation to the library and the collection, initial training on local cataloging and scanning procedures, choosing a portion of the collection to work with, developing a plan for cataloging and scanning of that portion of the collection, carrying out cataloging and scanning (including overseeing a graduate student assistant’s work), researching metadata standards with respect to sheet music, and exploring the possibility of exposing Gaylord’s sheet music metadata to the Sheet Music Consortium (an OAI-compliant metadata harvester).

Estimated breakdown of hours spent on various objectives (135 hours total):

1) Initial orientation to collection and evaluation of collection (with Brad) – 10 hours

2) Choose a reasonable portion of collection to work with and develop plan for cataloging and scanning – 10 hours

3) Initial cataloging (with Mark) and scanning (with Brad) training – 10 hours

4) Carry out cataloging and scanning (including overseeing/directing a graduate student assistant’s work) – 50 hours

5) Research on best practices for descriptive metadata standards for sheet music – 15 hours

6) Sheet Music Consortium exploration (including some consultation with Digital Library staff at Washington Univ. Libraries and Stephen Davison of the Sheet Music Consortium) – 40 hours

Other related issues I expect to learn about in the process of carrying out these activities include copyright, history and best practices of sheet music cataloging, advantages and disadvantages of submitting sheet music cataloging records to OCLC’s database, project management, and how to determine preservation and/or digitization priorities.