Collected Works Project

For my big project of the semester, I am working on cross examining the Music Library's collection of Composers' Collected Works published by Harrassowitz.  Collected Works are compilations of all of the output of a certain composer, and are often multi-volume sets.  These sets are usually released one volume at a time, and are maintained via Standing Order with the company -- meaning that they will automatically bill us and send us the next volume as it becomes available.

My job in all of this is to check the catalog which Harrassowitz keeps password-protected on its site with both a spreadsheet containing all of our current and completed Standing Orders as well as our current collection in WorkFlows to make sure that our holdings are up to date.  While this can be slightly tedious at times (do you know many volumes there are of the Haydn Ausgabe??  124.)  Collected Works are one of the most used items in the Music Library, and thus it is very important to make sure that the volumes we possess are up to date, and if we do NOT have a Standing Order for a set, that we have Firm Ordered all that are available.

Not only has this project been an eye opener for me because of the lack of updating that happens to the Publisher's catalog (we have a few volumes that aren't even LISTED on the site) but it has made me aware of more obscure composers and their styles of work.  Thus, my musicology muscle is being worked along with my Collections Development organ.

On top of this project, I started working with an Eastern European vendor this past week named East View Information Services.

They sent us a spreadsheet of available titles in Eastern European scores and monographs.  I spent most of this past week working with OCLC and Workflows to determine our own holdings of the scores they listed.  This was a tad problematic (and time consuming) if only because the ISBN numbers provided on said list often yielded either other titles unrelated to the score, or no title at all.  While this is not that big of a deal, it certainly lengthened my search times for each title.  The only other issue I encountered was that often the titles had been translated from, say, Russian script to an Anglocized alphabet, meaning they had perhaps been cataloged under another form of that name.  Two hundred and fourteen titles later, I was able to come up with a cohesive list for us to order and strengthen our Eastern European classical music holdings.

The list itself also contains monographs (over 700 of them), but I am currently waiting on my Internship adviser to decide whether or not these are worth our time, since a vast majority of them are in Russian or other Eastern European languages, and thus would not be the most accessible items if added to our collections.