| Book Review: Directions in Music Cataloging | |
| Robert Freeborn | |
| Robert Freeborn, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania; rbf6@psu.edu | |
Although this book is officially titled Directions in Music Cataloging, it could easily have been called Why Ralph Papakhian Mattered. Arsen Ralph Papakhian, who passed away in 2010, was a music cataloging librarian at Indiana University (IU). He played a pivotal role in the direction of music cataloging for three decades, and served as an educator, mentor, or colleague to most music catalogers in the United States. Editors Peter Lisius and Richard Griscom have brought together a group of authors to pay homage either directly or indirectly to Papakhian and his influence on the music cataloging community.
The book is divided into three sections. Part 1, “The Foundations of Music Cataloging Today,” features articles reflecting Papakhian’s impact on scholarship and the professional community. “Music in the OCLC WorldCat, A Replication,” was written by noted cataloging educator Richard Smiraglia with students from one of his library science classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It is a modern-day recreation of the original 1981 study published by Papakhian and Smiraglia. The two had searched the relatively new OCLC WorldCat online union catalog for music-related bibliographic records. Their results concluded that records for more than 90 percent of the recommended musical monographs were available, while the percentages for scores and sound recordings were noticeably lower. Results from the replicated study by Smiraglia’s library students proved similar. WorldCat held cataloging records for almost 99 percent of the recommended books and popular sound recordings, while percentages for scores and classical sound recordings hovered in the 60s and 70s. Following this chapter is Smiraglia’s “Theoretical Implications Arising from the Study of Personal Name Headings in the Indiana University Music Library Card Catalogs,” another homage to an earlier work by his late colleague and friend. In 1985, Papakhian wrote an article on the frequency of personal name authority records in the Indiana University Music Library. The study and subsequent paper were done in rebuttal to a series of earlier articles in the field promoting the concept of Lotka’s Law, which argues the majority of authors in a union catalog have written only one work. Papakhian showed empirically that in a music library, where the majority of holdings feature works by a handful of composers, Lotka’s Law did not hold. Smiraglia’s chapter looks again at the findings of Papakhian’s work and its subsequent impact on the field, demonstrating just how important it had become since its publication. The final paper in this part of the book is Jay Weitz’s fascinating, “Furthering Access to Music: A History of the Music OCLC Users Group.” The contribution is a wonderfully insightful look into the User Group’s formation, growth, and distinguished board members.
Part 2, “Cataloging Theory in Transition,” opens with Damian Iseminger’s “Works and Expression in RDA: Problems and Solutions.” Iseminger provides a brief history of RDA: Resource Description and Access, as well as a basic introduction to its main concepts.1 He then notes some problems with the new cataloging rules—one of the biggest being the decision to be backward-compatible with the older Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2).2 Damian concludes by providing a series of possible solutions that could aid music catalogers when working in RDA. Next is “The Music Genre/Form Project: History, Accomplishments, and Future Directions,” by Beth Iseminger. For some time, music librarians have pushed for the creation of music-related genre/form heading (e.g., what the item being cataloged is) thesauri, in addition to the existing ones for topical headings (e.g., what the item being cataloged is about). Beth Iseminger relates how this dream is finally coming to fruition, thanks to a joint task force by the Library of Congress and the Music Library Association. She discusses the problems faced by the task force, the solutions they arrived at, and reflects at the future direction of the project. The section then concludes with Michelle Hahn’s essay “Dreams from My Library.” Hahn looks at RDA and its use of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) concept, and discusses where she thinks it falls short of the mark. She then concludes with her visions for a FRBR-ized catalog, and her thoughts on the future of music cataloging.
The third and final part, “Current and Emerging Standard in Practice,” concerns itself with trying to put music cataloging theory into practice. It also could be thought of as “making the most of a bad situation,” as often real-world situations are not as cut-and-dried as the rules suggest. The first chapter, Suzanne Mudge’s “Cataloging Ethnographic Audiovisual Field Collections,” deals with cataloging process for handling these materials as instituted by both the Archives of Traditional Music (Indiana University) and the Loeb Music Library Archive of World Music (Harvard University). From their initial accessioning to the creation of the finding aid using Encoded Archival Description (EAD), Mudge utilizes rules from AACR2, Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) and other standards, such as Archival Moving Image Materials (AMIM), to create her cataloging records using the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) metadata standard. Next is Peter Lisius’s “Square Pegs in Round Holes: Adapting Cataloging Metadata Standards for Use with Digital Media Files.” Lisius deals with the unenviable task of adapting the simple digital tags in Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software to AACR2 and RDA descriptive standards. This chapter is definitely worth a look for those trying to shoehorn classical music information such as a work with multiple sections and performers into the standard “Song, Album, Artist” labels scrolling across your iPod or Windows Media Player display window. Finally, “The FRBR Models: Thinking More Deeply about Library Metadata” by Jenn Riley looks at conceptual models, especially FRBR, as the basis for metadata standards. The IU Variations/FRBR project automatically converts MARC records for IU’s sound recordings and scores into a more FRBR-ized format, and then displays them through its online discovery interface. The results are interesting, and quite possibly provide a sneak peek at the future of catalog displays in a FRBR/RDA world.
The book culminates with a thoughtful remembrance of Ralph by his long-time IU colleague and friend, Sue Stancu. Her wonderful anecdotes and insights both give a glimpse of the man to those who never knew him and an even greater understanding to those of us who had interacted with Ralph on a limited basis. As a music cataloger, I am thankful to have read this book, and even more thankful to have known Ralph Papakhian.
Reference
| 1. | RDA: Resource Description & Access (Chicago: ALA, 2010): |
| 2. | Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed., 2002 rev., 2005 update (Chicago: ALA; Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; London: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, 2002). |
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