Faceted Vocabularies for Music: A New Era in Resource Discovery

Abstract

The new faceted music vocabularies, the Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus (LCMPT) 2 and the music portions of the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) 3 , are long-anticipated products in a history of problemsolving approaches toward descriptive terms for music. These approaches have evolved from the early days of modern music librarianship through more recent efforts to establish a thesaurus of music terminology. MLA's Cataloging and Metadata Committee has collaborated with the Library of Congress for the past several years in a multi-phase endeavor to design and build out these new vocabularies. A detailed account of this endeavor, as well as challenges for implementation of the vocabularies in library metadata, will be discussed. HistoryThe early work on music subject headings took place in the print-only environment of card catalogs and reference sources, which ultimately forced decisions about entry points in the catalog. Should musical works be listed primarily under their form or their instrumentation? The answers could vary according to the type of use, research, or performance, for example. In the card catalog, form typically won over medium of performance, because all works have a medium, while form provided a more specific qualifier. 4 2 Consistency was a major concern in early subject analysis. Librarians sought uniformity in subject terminology across libraries, particularly in terms of heading construction. A standard print list could also serve as a training tool, to assist catalogers in applying headings for specific subjects with which they were not as familiar. In 1933, the Music Library Association (MLA) compiled such a list of subject headings based on Library of Congress catalog cards, and in 1935, the Library of Congress (LC) published a list of subject headings for books about music. 5 These endeavors provide early illustrations of how music librarians conceived of a music thesaurus as a set of descriptors that would include headings applicable to all types of musical resources. 6 The 1980s and 1990s: Towards a Music ThesaurusThe advent of computer technology, online catalogs, and database tools provided an impetus for developing more fully structured music vocabularies. Inspired by the success of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) sponsored by the Getty Research Institute, as well as the well-designed RILM Thesaurus, MLA formed the Music Thesaurus Project Working Group in 1985. The group envisioned a comprehensive thesaurus covering the entire discipline of music that could be used not only in cataloging all formats of music materials for libraries, and for book and periodical indexing. 7 Following the report of the Working Group in 1989, Harriette Hemmasi (then music librarian at Rutgers University; currently University Librarian at Brown University) began development of a prototype music thesaurus in 1991 with Dr. James Anderson and Fred Rowley, through a grant from the Council on Library Resources. Anderson and Rowley ha...

Classifying Musical Genres. Building Musical Form and Genre into BCC: Repurposing LCGFT Terms for Music into the Basic Concepts Classification

“…. The initial list of terms was drawn from existing terms for musical forms and genres in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), supplemented by analysis of other sources from the music and music librarianship literature (Iseminger 2012, Iseminger et al 2017. The uptake of the LCGFT music terms has been reasonably substantial: in a survey of general LCGFT usage, Bitter and Tosaka (2020) found that 54% of responding libraries would add music LCGFT for their collections when copy cataloging.…”

On the State of Genre/Form Vocabulary: A Quantitative Analysis of LCGFT Data in WorldCat

“…11 Iseminger and others have also considered LCGFT development and applications in specialist communities, such as music cataloging. 12 As adding LCGFT headings to legacy metadata is clearly a very important step in fully realizing the benefits of the new vocabulary, Mullin examined the process for automatically assigning them for music resources retrospectively based on the presence of LCSH terms in their bibliographic records. 13 Now that more than a decade has passed since the LCGFT thesaurus first became available for use in the library community, recent literature has finally started analyzing data on how the LCGFT thesaurus has been deployed in library catalogs and digital repositories.…”

The Application of Fog Computing and Internet of Things Technology in Music Resource Management Model

“…In recent years, with the emergence of music dance resource management problems, many scholars have also carried out research on music dance resource management [11]. Righi et al believed that users can effectively and quickly retrieve and analyze the music resources they need through the unique semantic indexing technology [12]. Hu et al proposed that digital music resources can be accurately digitized through technologies such as virtual reality and metadata, so that users can have a better experience [13].…”