More sorting
Saturday, June 17th - 2:15-4:45pm
Today I continued with sorting the uncataloged box of music that I had started a few weeks ago. I realized partway through that I wasn't really looked very closely for "Midwest publishers" so some of those probably got in other categories. I created some new categories (exotic, sea, dance, women (there was a really cool women's lib-y one from the early 1900's!), morning, etc.) and combined a few other categories. The "sentimental" category is getting to be huge! There were a lot of popular, very sentimental, lovey-dovey types of songs in that box. I'm really enjoying this, though I don't like to have loose ends, so that huge pile of ?'s is really bugging me (things that don't really seem to fit in any particular category). It's hard to know what the most important aspect/subject of a piece of sheet music might be - it entirely depends on who's looking for it and why they're looking for it. Someone may be more interested in the cover art instead of the fact that the song is about a garden, or another person may be more interested in the fact that something is a lullaby than the fact that it was published in the Midwest. I could go on and on with hypothetical examples!
I'm still having trouble deciding what parts of the collection I want to focus on. I can be a fairly indecisive person, but this is getting ridiculous! I think need to step back and really think about my goals and the different aspects of my project in order to make a good decision. I will be doing a presentation in Pittsburgh next Spring for the MLA national conference (for the Sheet Music Roundtable) about my project. Since the other presentations are about war/patriotic/political topics, I choose a title from a World War I piece that I thought fit very nicely - "Where do we go from here: Developing an OAI sheet music project at Washington University." So, in talking about my project (probably focusing on the Sheet Music Consortium part of it, which, by the way, is a definite go - Brad talked with Andrew Rouner, the director of the Digital Libraries Initiative at Wash U, and we will be able to work with him and his staff on this - this is great news!), I'll use that title as an example and try to pick several other war/political/patriotic titles to use as well.
One thing I thought about while sorting is that I could work on integrating these "orphans" into other parts of the collection where they would fit. Adding things to already created topical boxes or composer boxes, for example. One would have to search the supplementary catalog to see if records for other copies of these already exist (in which case they could be added as second copies in the catalog and housed along with the first copy) - this is something that I could perhaps have Matt do. Things that aren't yet cataloged could be cataloged and placed in the appropriate place in the collection. I could maybe pick some of the larger categories to start with (the sentimental/popular stuff for instance) and then go from there. I'd also place priority on those that are by composers who already have their own special boxes (Gottschalk, Irving Berlin, for example). This might be an interesting exercise in tying up loose ends, per se. I don't think I'd include scanning in this, though, since it would involve bits and pieces from different areas, and it seems that it's easiest to work on scanning entire boxes/sections at a time.
Another pile that's developed is a pile of incomplete pieces - just one or several pages from something but the whole thing's not there. It'll be fun trying to figure out what goes with what!
Hours today: 2.5 (plus 1 hour today (Sunday) updating my blog)
Total hours completed: 15
Today I continued with sorting the uncataloged box of music that I had started a few weeks ago. I realized partway through that I wasn't really looked very closely for "Midwest publishers" so some of those probably got in other categories. I created some new categories (exotic, sea, dance, women (there was a really cool women's lib-y one from the early 1900's!), morning, etc.) and combined a few other categories. The "sentimental" category is getting to be huge! There were a lot of popular, very sentimental, lovey-dovey types of songs in that box. I'm really enjoying this, though I don't like to have loose ends, so that huge pile of ?'s is really bugging me (things that don't really seem to fit in any particular category). It's hard to know what the most important aspect/subject of a piece of sheet music might be - it entirely depends on who's looking for it and why they're looking for it. Someone may be more interested in the cover art instead of the fact that the song is about a garden, or another person may be more interested in the fact that something is a lullaby than the fact that it was published in the Midwest. I could go on and on with hypothetical examples!
I'm still having trouble deciding what parts of the collection I want to focus on. I can be a fairly indecisive person, but this is getting ridiculous! I think need to step back and really think about my goals and the different aspects of my project in order to make a good decision. I will be doing a presentation in Pittsburgh next Spring for the MLA national conference (for the Sheet Music Roundtable) about my project. Since the other presentations are about war/patriotic/political topics, I choose a title from a World War I piece that I thought fit very nicely - "Where do we go from here: Developing an OAI sheet music project at Washington University." So, in talking about my project (probably focusing on the Sheet Music Consortium part of it, which, by the way, is a definite go - Brad talked with Andrew Rouner, the director of the Digital Libraries Initiative at Wash U, and we will be able to work with him and his staff on this - this is great news!), I'll use that title as an example and try to pick several other war/political/patriotic titles to use as well.
One thing I thought about while sorting is that I could work on integrating these "orphans" into other parts of the collection where they would fit. Adding things to already created topical boxes or composer boxes, for example. One would have to search the supplementary catalog to see if records for other copies of these already exist (in which case they could be added as second copies in the catalog and housed along with the first copy) - this is something that I could perhaps have Matt do. Things that aren't yet cataloged could be cataloged and placed in the appropriate place in the collection. I could maybe pick some of the larger categories to start with (the sentimental/popular stuff for instance) and then go from there. I'd also place priority on those that are by composers who already have their own special boxes (Gottschalk, Irving Berlin, for example). This might be an interesting exercise in tying up loose ends, per se. I don't think I'd include scanning in this, though, since it would involve bits and pieces from different areas, and it seems that it's easiest to work on scanning entire boxes/sections at a time.
Another pile that's developed is a pile of incomplete pieces - just one or several pages from something but the whole thing's not there. It'll be fun trying to figure out what goes with what!
Hours today: 2.5 (plus 1 hour today (Sunday) updating my blog)
Total hours completed: 15
posted by Amy | 8:56 PM
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