MOUG 2025 - Changing Our Tune - Katelynn Telford ; Mandi Shepp
Changing Our Tune: Updating the Bibliographic Scope for a Historical Sheet Music Collection
Katelynn Telford, SUNY Fredonia
Mandi Shepp, SUNY Fredonia
From the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Music OCLC Users Group, March 6 & 7, 2025
SUNY Fredonia's Historical Popular Sheet Music Collection started off as a digital collection with the corresponding physical materials stored in a non-archival setting (e.g., cardboard boxes in a closet). Previous catalogers emphasized the importance of the cover art imagery over the music itself, leading to a very cluttered catalog of subject headings that did not always relate to the music's content. In this presentation, SUNY Fredonia's Music & Fine Arts Librarian and Coordinator of Special Collections & Archives will discuss their approach to correcting the myriad of issues associated with bringing this physical and digital collection up to appropriate digitization, archival, and metadata standards. Their efforts focus on increased discoverability of the materials in this collection and improved user experience with regards to the digital collection.