MOUG 2024 - Approaching Cataloging of Non-Western European Music - Jones
Approaching Cataloging of Non-Western European Music
Randye Jones, Grinnell College (retired)
From the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Music OCLC Users Group, February 16 & 28, 2024
The current efforts to diversify musical collections and to encourage musicians to explore musics beyond that of Western Europe present the opportunity to reassess how the recordings, scores, and books covering these musics can be cataloged to make them easier for patrons to identify and access. Is it feasible to broaden how we select fields--especially for uniform titles and access points--to organize data in a way that more comprehensively describes this music? This presentation discusses folk and concert spirituals as one example, looking at some of the challenges that this specific musical genre has created for the cataloging process and presenting some proposals for addressing those challenges.