Paper for the 1992 Music Library Association Contemporary Music Subject Access Roundtable Meeting. This paper discusses preliminary models for a database of composition styles of twentieth century composers.
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Paper for the 1992 Music Library Association Contemporary Music Subject Access Roundtable Meeting. This paper discusses preliminary models for a database of composition styles of twentieth century composers.
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17 p.
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Abstract: The Contemporary Music Subject Access Roundtable, last year identified a problem: genre terms for twentieth century music are needed by the users of the bibliographic utilities and other music librarians. This is the first step. Now we must strive toward a structure for the data.This paper presents two models for preliminary consideration by the Roundtable. The well-known usage as discussed in the MARC Formats Subcommittee meeting of the Music Library Association in 1991 at Indianapolis centered on the individual bibliographic record as the store of information. My proposals are for a separate database for this material. The first is an authority record based system, similar to or integrated with those authority control systems of the Library of Congress, OCLC, and several local systems. Data is added in a variable field, with the source of the stylistic identification given. This puts the identification at the composition title level rather than at the edition level, since the form/genre is unlikely to change from the original composition to an arrangement, but the medium of performance, date of revision, etc. may change. The second consists of a thesaurus, list by composer and work, with indexes by term, date of compositions, and medium performance. An alternative is to use a relational database, such as PARADOX, to store the information relating to individual compositions. A secondary relational file may contain the bibliography of sources used to define the forms/genres. Other relational files can be used to hold the various definitions of a genre and identify the sources of these definitions. Presently, this appears to be to complex or cumbersome for convenient use.
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