Re: [ARSCLIST] cataloging sound recordings

[Karl Miller <lyaa071@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 14 May 2005, Steven C. Barr wrote:

> To be honest, MARC would probably overwhelm the average private collector!
> First, many of the fields are not really applicable to sound recordings,
> since MARC was created to catalog (primarily) print items, mainly books.

As someone with over 25 years of experience as a librarian...I taught for
my earlier years...and with 45 years of being a collector of recordings, I
find MARC overwhelming.

Indeed the format was designed for books, hence, it creates a
"bibliographic" record and not a "discographic" record. While the format
is highly adaptable, it is not, in my experience, user friendly.

> Secondly, even the fields which would apply to sound recordings often are
> more appropriate to libraries than private collectors.

And from my perspective, some of the required fields are of no use to
anyone, or, at the very least, duplication required by a system to serve a
functionality which no longer exists...I wonder, do they still print
cards?

> After looking at MARC data records, I see than many, if not most, of
> the the fields in my application aren't present in MARC (they could
> be added as internal-use fields...is there a limit on those?).

It depends on your system, for us, about 50 fields is the limit.
One however needs to keep in mind that each added entry is a field. Hence,
if you have a jazz recording with 35 title entries and several different
sets of players, you cannot do an added entry for each player. On the
other hand, if you local search mechanism will provide keyword access to a
contents note, you will probably be able to retrieve the item via that
keyword search.

> What I would suggest would be private-collection cataloguing
> software that was MARC-compatible (that used fields which exist
> in MARC, with the same sizes...since MARC appears to create
> text-based files, type wouldn't matter) so that it would be
> possible to import data into a MARC-based or MARC-compatible
> database file. It might be possible to define a set of core
> fields for sound recordings, and then have a facility which
> would allow users to include additional fields should they
> wish to do so.

Why not a system that designed for information, not just books, and
designed for the digital environment, one which could load those MARC
records?

Karl