Being the scholar that he is, however, Smiraglia has transformed his relatively simple bibliography into an extended teachable moment about the evolution of music cataloging, the major concerns of the profession, and the structure of its discourse community. His introductory “From James Duff Brown (1897) to Arsen Ralph Papakhian (2000): An Essay on the Literature of the Bibliographic Control of Music” (5–30) deserves to be read widely among practicing music catalogers. It is a happy case of the bibliographer being “led out of routine facts into scholarship itself,” as D. W. Krummel put it. 1

At the center of Smiragila’s book is the chronological listing of a century plus of publications, some 880 citations of both monographic and periodical literature. It is followed by four indexes for title, author, keyword, and journal title. To my knowledge, there has been no comparable full-length bibliography devoted to the bibliographic control of music. This volume had its genesis in the research Smiraglia began in 1983 for his seminal Music Cataloging: The Bibliographic Control of Printed and Recorded Music in Libraries and gestated for over two decades.²

In his introduction, Smiraglia admits that “the coverage, although comprehensive, is not exhaustive, particularly of foreign publications” (1). He lists the print and online sources consulted (2–3) and notes that “unpublished research papers directly relevant to the bibliographic control of music were added as they became known” (1–2).

One could quibble about certain works that have been overlooked. For instance, although Nancy B. Olson’s 1981 Cataloging of Audiovisual Materials: A Manual Based on AACR2 is cited, her later Cataloger’s Guide to MARC Coding and Tagging for Audiovisual Material is missing in action.³ Deborah A. Fritz’s Cataloging with AACR2 and USMARC for Books, Computer Files, Serials, Sound Recordings, Video Recordings has also been omitted.⁴

The most unfortunate oversight, though, is that there is but a single reference to the Music OCLC Users Group’s (MOUG) MOUG Newsletter. (In the interest of full disclosure, I admit to being the OCLC Online Computer Library Center Liaison to MOUG since 1989 and a frequent contributor to said publication.) The omission is particularly ironic, considering that Smiraglia himself has served as both treasurer (1980–82) and chair (1982–84) of MOUG. It should also be said that the omission is understandable, considering that the MOUG Newsletter is not regularly indexed in any of the standard sources. But since the MOUG Newsletter began publication in 1977, it has grown in importance as a source of information about music cataloging for a wide range of catalogers. A quick look at just a few issues yields substantive articles comparing music cataloging to book cataloging, evaluating sound recording cataloging quality in OCLC’s WorldCat, and reporting on the joint Library of Congress/OCLC music uniform title project.⁵ Any one of these is of more import than the one MOUG Newsletter citation that does appear in the bibliography.⁶

Given Smiraglia’s own declaration of the primacy of the book review as a means of communication in the music cataloging community (25–26), it is also surprising that he has not given better access to the over 140 reviews cited. Reviews are indexed by their authors, but not by the author or the title of the book being reviewed, either or both of which would have been helpful.

These are, however, merely minor shortcomings in an otherwise solid and valuable contribution to the literature of music librarianship, one that fulfills the wider goal of the chronological bibliography, “that of suggesting the development of the field itself.”⁷