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!