Music Library Association on work records for music
Kathy Glennan, chair of the Music Library Association‘s Bibliographic Control Committee, last week announced on the RDA-L mailing list:
The Music Library Association’s Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC) is pleased to announce the availability of the Final Report of The BCC Working Group on Work Records for Music (available at: http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/BCC/BCC-Historical/BCC2008/BCC2008WGWRM1.pdf). As BCC chair, I constituted this short-term working group in April, charging the seven members to look at the issues surrounding the question of what elements and attributes of musical works should be included in a work record, once the cataloging community moves beyond AACR2 and MARC21 to a new descriptive model that stores data in a relational or object-oriented database.
It’s a short report, nine pages plus a two page introduction. From the Discussion section towards the end:
As most musical works in the Western canon contain an internal structure (movements, arias, etc.), it is desirable, and indeed necessary, to describe this structure in the work record. Current authority record practice sanctions the creation of separate records for parts of larger works, when necessary for creating access points. The user then infers the whole/part relationship based on the syntax of these access points (e.g. “Zauberflöte. Hölle Rache” is a part of “Zauberflöte”).
In a relational database environment, such whole/part relationships can better be represented by dynamic relationships (expressed as links) between larger works and their parts. This is especially desirable when the parts have discrete attributes of their own (e.g. Variant titles, Keys).