Herrera Metadata, Michelle Godfrey - Jan 31, 2014

Still working through the MSS160-b4-f01. The only questionable item I encountered was a handwritten document with no date. I was not sure what title to give it and basically just did the transcription in the description field. All else went well and the end of this huge folder really is in sight.

Shab, sheet music collection project, 1/30/2014

Today I managed to input data from 65 more cards into the sheet music collection project spreadsheet.  My progress this week was slowed by several unusual problems I haven't encountered much before: the mysterious abbreviated "n.p." (which could mean unpaged?), more spelling and typo problems which may require checking the hard copy music upstairs, foreign language cards problems, the bizarre new phenomenon of finding multiple titles on a single card (which don't appear to be a series, but rather just different song titles on the same card), finding information in areas different from where they would normally be on the card (for instance, one had "Church" written on a card for a sacred processional song next to the supposed title of the song - where normally the publisher's name is written; another example had Berlin - presumably the place of publication? - written next to the date without anything else written next to it).  The problem I'm most unsure about today could be the card that had a full table of contents of the music in it.  I vaguely remember having another card before with the table of contents listing on it and if I remember correctly, I was advised not to include it in the spreadsheet; however, for this card, since the contents numbered 1-3, I did put it into the contents note field.  Now that I think about it, however, I do get a strong feeling it doesn't belong there so I may go and delete it. 

Herrera Metadata, Michelle Godfrey - Jan. 23, 2013

Today I was able to resume work for MSS160-b4-f01. There were no problems with any of the items I was able to complete. This large folder still has several more documents to process, but the end is in sight.

Photos & Herrera metadata

Scanned a few extra photos, then worked on a few more Herrera folders: MSS160-b3-f23, -f25, -f26, and -f27.

HPLM_MSS160-b3-f27-01 is in Spanish; seems to be the same sort of layout as the text for a radio broadcast speech from an earlier folder, though. Ditto for -02, -03 (which may be a rough draft version of 01), and -04. The other two items were English, though, and I was able to complete the records for them.

Sheet Music Cataloging Project- Emily Perkins 1/16/14

Today I inputted data from 73 cards. The issues I encountered today were spelling inconsistencies and the one to many relationship between artists and publishers. Of the twenty cards cataloging the sheet music of Antonin Dvorak, his name was spelled "Dvořák" once, "Dvǒrák" once, "Anton" twice, and "Dvorak, Antonin" the rest of the time. It seems that the catalogers had no idea how to spell his name and didn't bother to at least make it uniform. If I'm going to spell someone's name wrong, I'll at least do it wrong every time, not just throw in some possibly correct entries hoping one of them is right. I'm not sure how this will affect searching, but it can't be good. Also, I noticed that most artists use several publishers, and often for the same song. But those publishers are usually never spelled the same way twice. I did all of the Bob Dylan cards today (yay!) and I noticed that he only used about six different publishers for the 38 songs in our catalog, but they are spelled several different ways making it look like almost fifteen different publishers. I would like to use authority files to fix this, but I will bring this up after I finish drawer 4, which I am about 1/3 of the way through. I now know how to use the concatenate and find and replace functions in excel, and I think this might make editing and fixing easier at the end!

Department photos & Herrera metadata

Finished up scanning the department photos with no problems.

Finished up MSS160-b3-f13, which I'd started...about a month ago! A couple of the items were only partial letters: the first page of one, the second page of another. I also completed MSS160-b3-f21 with no complications.

Shab, sheet music collection project

Today I managed to input 76 more cards of drawer 3 of the sheet music collection project.  Aside from the routine cards, oddities included finding what seemed to be a card listing more than one piece of music on it (two different titles and composers), a possible spelling error ("wondring"?), and uncertainties about titles because of two different titles separated by forward slashes (/).  I tried Googling some of these titles to see if they could be uniform or alternate or subtitles but most of these songs are so little-known, I couldn't turn up anything whereas normally I usually get some page hits on lyrics sites for the more famous songs to be able to discern possible alternate title designations.  Aside from this, two general questions came up:  1) what to do (if anything) about cards which have notations of them such as "pre-1900".  The dates are already noted on the spreadsheet so for now I'm not including these notations anywhere.  I'm not certain they need to be included in the spreadsheet because they don't seem to fit under any of the current fields and 2) a concern another person working on this project brought up, which is if "popular song sheet" really belongs in the instrumentation field.  It never occurred to me before, but it makes sense.  Please see my comment to Emily Perkins's last post dated January 2 to see my thoughts on this.  Thanks! 

Deptartment Photographs - Elaine Patton, 1/9/2014

Today I worked on scanning photos out of the department albums. Have about a third-ish of the older album to complete.

Straightforward but for the apparently missing photo here and there:

• catdept-015 is on the bottom half of a page titled Surprise Party for Rosa Lin and next to a caption listing 10 names, but only 3 people are visible in that photo.
• catdept-016 is on the top half of a page for Monica Simon's leaving the catalog department; a caption of names is on the bottom half, but there's no photo to accompany it.
• catdept-018's album page has a caption listing names with no matching photo
• catdept-162's page was missing a photo.
• catdept-277's album page was missing a group picture.

Other:

• catdept-027 & -028 have both 2006 and 2007 written on the back; the latter has "January ? 2007", so I assume 2007 is just when they were added, maybe?
• 094-120 were in an envelope in the back of the newer album.

Shab, sheet music collection project

Today I managed the input the data from 52 cards of drawer 3 of the sheet music collection project.  As always, most of the cards were straightforward.  I only came up with two unusual issues that I have highlighted for further follow-up.  One of the cards had a designation I didn't recognize: it said n.p.  (on the card with the title Flee as a bird by Mary S.B. Dana).  I asked Jeanette and she seemed to think it could mentioned unpaged?  I didn't put it into the spreadsheet (Cecilia, please let me know if this is wrong so I can correct it next week).  The other issue was another strange thing I've never seen before: where the publisher's name normally appears, it said "Henry G. Thayer Orchestra Library" (Cecilia, I've highlighted this in blue and marked the text red for you to check the card because for now, I put it in the publisher field though it most likely doesn't belong on the spreadsheet?)  I tried to google it to see if there really is such a library somewhere to shed some light on why it was on the card but came up with no results.  Otherwise, everything was mostly routine. 

Sheet Music Cataloging Project- Emily Perkins, 1/2/14

Today I inputted data from 86 cards. I came across something new today when I saw a Collection referenced where the Publisher is usually indicated. If no publisher is listed, can a collection go in the publisher field? This specific collection was the "Houston Saengerbund Collection." As I worked today I had more thoughts about the publisher field. Are there authorities for record companies (perhaps LOC) so as to provide some uniformity and improved searchibility? Every other time a company is listed it's shortened, or abbreviated, or lengthened. How important is uniformity in this case? I feel like if there's any area where uniformity is important, it's cataloging. Also, many times a single card will list multiple Publishers, sometimes appearing after a backslash, a comma, or within parentheses after the first publisher is listed. While this relation is unclear to me, I think that is less important than finding a single way to separate these elements so that a person who knows one of the two or three publishers associated with that piece of music can find the MARC record easily. Perhaps a semicolon with a space on either side? I guess it depends with how the spreadsheet gets uploaded. I am also starting to notice a correlation between the "Instrumentation" field and "Subject 1 (600, 650, 700)," when that subject is not a person. And I am beginning to believe that "Popular song sheet" should not be listed in the instrumentation field. But I am not sure where else I would like to see it.