Cataloging

Today I worked on some more cataloging. I feel like I'm going REALLY slow, but I know I'll get quicker as I get more comfortable and don't have to look everything up. I think I cleaned up the first record I had worked on, with the help of Mark's suggestions, and I created two more records today. I have some questions to ask Mark about various things I came across. I don't know why, but I really enjoy trying to figure out the dates. I can see that there's a temptation to spend a lot of time on this kind of research, and one just has to know when to stop.

Smiraglia has a good quote on p.11 under 'Dates of publication, distribution, etc.', under 'Publishers' catalogs, national bibliographies, etc. He says, "It is also possible to determine approximate dates of publication by consulting publishers' catalogs or published bibliographies... Such efforts, however, require a great deal of time and bibliographical skill. For most library catalogs the results do not justify the effort." I think I would agree with that for the most part, but once one knows which resources are worth looking at, it doesn't take all that much time to take a look. If you find yourself spending a lot of time and aren't coming up with the answer, maybe it's time to stop and just make do with what you have (even if it's just a really vague estimated date like [18--?].

Hours today: 3.5
Total hours completed: 40.5

More exporting

Yesterday I spent about another hour or so working on exporting records. Still not getting the results I want, and I'm running out of ideas for things to try and people to ask. I emailed Andrew and Cassandra three different text files that show what I've got so far (I had a file exported from the OPAC that has MARC tags but no III rec. numbers, a file exported from character-based Innopac in ASCII format, and a file exported using Millennium in an unknown format (I'm guessing ASCII)). Very frustrating! I really didn't think this part of the project would turn out to be so difficult. I hope I'll get some guidance from the DL people as to whether or not any of these options I've discovered so far will work, or if I need to keep trying.

Hours today (yesterday): 1
Total hours completed: 37

More cataloging

This afternoon I spent 2 hours on cataloging activities. I spent some time looking through the records for some of the bound volumes that had already been analyzed, and then I started cataloging volume 70 and made it all the way through the first piece! I'm not feeling very confident with uniform titles and subject headings since I just don't deal with those very often. I have some things to check and I'll probably need to go back and fix a few things. Yesterday I learned from Mark about resources for finding dates for German publishers (using plate numbers, etc.), but I need to find the resources for doing the same with British publishers (and any other country's publishers I may come across in this bound volume). I found a record for a similar thing in WorldCat (from the same opera, same publisher, etc.) and the date was listed as [182-?], but I'd like to find something a little more authoritative and perhaps exact. Fun stuff! No really, it is.

Hours today: 2
Total hours completed: 36

Cataloging and export attempts

Yesterday I worked with Mark on cataloging part of a bound volume. We also explored export options from the supplementary catalog, but for some reason exporting in MARC format isn't working. I tried again just now and was able to export in ASCII, Pro Cite, and End Note, but not MARC. Maybe ASCII will work okay (I'll need to ask Andrew and Cassandra), but for some reason in that format it wasn't exporting with the MARC tags but with the descriptive tags instead. I also tried from Millennium but I couldn't even figure out how to get to the sheet music catalog in Millennium to begin with! Obviously missing some important pieces of information. If all else fails, I'll use the export from the OPAC and paste in the .b numbers. That might honestly take less time than trying to figure out another way to export!

Hours today (and yesterday): 3
Total hours completed: 34

Sheet Music Consortium issues, cont.

Last week I met with Brad and Mark separately to talk about some of the Sheet Music Consortium issues. Still haven't heard back from Stephen Davison, but Brad recommended talking to Phil Ponella, Indiana's Music Library director, to see what he knows about Indiana using DLXS for this purpose.

This week I really hope to get going on the exporting records business and also work on some cataloging.

Hours today (last Wed. and Fri. actually): 2
Total hours completed: 31

Sheet Music Consortium issues

Monday I met with Andrew Rouner, the Wash U Digital Library Systems director, and Cassandra Stokes, also of the Digital Library Systems unit, to talk about the options for getting the sheet music record data from where it is and in the format it's currently in to a format in which it will be able to be harvested by the Sheet Music Consortium's OAI metadata harvester.

After learning that we didn't have the add-on for III that would allow export of MARC records in XML and/or Dublin Core, I was thinking I'd need to end up doing a lot of hand-tagging and that it would be extremely time-consuming. My meeting with Andrew and Cassandra reassured me that a lot more of this process will be automated that I had thought, which is great news. My first order of business is to export the MARC records for the Balmer & Weber records as plain text and then we'll go from there. I'm still not sure of the best course of action for exporting the records - I'll ask Mark what he knows about exporting tomorrow when we meet. I have a basic understanding of how exporting works: I believe I'll run a list (can I run lists in the supplementary catalog?) of the Balmer & Weber records and export the MARC data as plain text to the hard drive. I guess it will just be one big text file at this point and then it will get broken up into individual records later?

Most of our meeting focused on the possibilities of exporting and then the processes it would take in order to get the MARC data into a format that would be able to be harvested by the SMC's harvester. Andrew did some follow-up research after our meeting and sent me an email with additional information about this. Apparently there are utilities for converting MARC records directly into BibClass (the bibliographic record module of the digital library system Wash U will be using, DLXS), and there is a program to expose OAI-compliant metadata to harvester (something called broker20, which is Univ. of Michigan's OAI-compatible data provider for shareable metadata. I don't understand where the transformation into unqualified Dublin Core comes in (it's my understanding that the Sheet Music Consortium only harvests data in this specific schema at this point in time). Is that what broker20 does, or is there some other step in there that I'm missing? I feel so clueless about this stuff, but I'm learning, slowly but surely...

The other aspect of this that needs to be figured out is if there needs to be some sort of public (or perhaps it wouldn't necessarily have to be public) interface through DLXS where the metadata and images would reside. According to Andrew, his impression is that BibClass doesn't exist solely to expose OAI metadata (I had asked if the metadata, including links to the images, could just exist on the server somewhere and be harvested, or if it had to be incorporated into some kind of interface), so we will probably need to put it all together (images, metadata, etc.) into DLXS. I'm still a little fuzzy on this, obviously...

I feel very fortunate that Andrew and Cassandra are willing and able to help me out with this - I would be at a complete loss without their help.

I spent several hours tonight digesting what we had talked about yesterday and looking at DLXS's website and examples of BibClass records to see if I could figure out what's going on. There are still a few holes in my understanding - I need to email Andrew to ask a few more questions. I also sent an email off to Stephen Davison of the SMC to let him know of my project and to see if he had any guidance or suggestions for me at this point. I also need to contact Jenn Riley at Indiana (wish I had been able to meet with her while I was in Bloomington last week!), since they are apparently using DLXS to expose their sheet music collection for the SMC. I have been dragging my feet about contacting Stephen since I really wanted to have somewhat of a clue of what I was talking about so I didn't sound like a complete idiot. Not sure I'm at that point yet, but I decided I couldn't wait any longer to contact him!

After meeting with Mark tomorrow afternoon, I hope to start working on exporting the records.

Hours today (and yesterday): 4
Total hours completed: 29

More misc.

Today I looked through some III export information and also cleaned up my sheet music sorting mess.

Hours today: 1
Total hours completed: 25

Sheet music cataloging - Gaylord procedures (and misc.)

Friday, June 30th

Today I met briefly with Brad to talk about how things are going and where to go next. I need to clean up the mess I made with sorting the uncataloged box of sheet music (I planned on doing that on Saturday, but I'll be doing it on Monday instead). We talked about the fact that it can be frustrating to have a plan of action and then come to find that you're limited by system capabilities, etc. Even if I only get a few metadata records ready to go for inclusion in the SMC, though, at least it will have been a good exercise and we'll know what's possible with our current configuration and capabilities. Since it's probably going to be a lot more time-consuming than initially anticipated, I probably won't get as far as I would have liked. I also don't know what the minimum number of records the SMC will accept to be included, but Brad seemed to think that as long as it sounds like we've got a plan, they'll be happy to include us.

I also met with Mark for several hours to look at local sheet music cataloging policies and procedures. I saw the default records that had been created (that prompt the cataloger to add information in prescribed fields) and watched Mark do a couple of examples. The previous bound volume I had chosen will probably not be the best to start with for various reasons, so I think I'll choose v. 70 instead (looked like it would have some interesting aspects to it). I don't think I'll get around to doing any cataloging until after I get back from the music cataloging workshop next week, so it will be interesting to see how much of what I learn there I'll be able to put to good use!

One additional idea I had: I don't know if it's possible to export records from OCLC's Connexion in XML/Dublin Core. It might be possible to just work with the Balmer and Weber records, bring the records we have up to OCLC standards (or use OCLC records that might already be there), and export from there. We'd need to add our holdings for these, though. But, that's something we've been talking about - how it might improve access to the collection if our holdings are set in OCLC (with the whole Open Worldcat thing). Something I need to look into...

Hours today: 3
Total hours completed: 24

Meeting about III export options

Wednesday, June 28th

Today I met with Pat Logsdon (Database management, III coordinator) and Cassandra Stokes (Digital Library sytems) about III export options. Since we don't have the add-on module for III that allows for export in XML, it looks like I'll have to export text/MARC records and do hand-tagging. Cassandra said she'd look into the possibility of exporting to Excel or Access to make things a little easier. Much more research to be done on this to determine the best course of action... I need to email Stephen Davison of UCLA and the Sheet Music Consortium to see what he would recommend next. Pat also suggested finding out if any of the current SMC members are III libraries and finding out how they did things.

Hours today: 1
Total hours completed: 21

Reviewing Sheet Music Consortium guidelines

Tuesday, June 27th

Tonight I reviewed the information I had about the Sheet Music Consortium and its guidelines for metadata and such. I'll add more details later...

Hours today: 1
Total hours completed: 20