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