Richard Griscom

Directions in Music Cataloging

Richard Griscom et al. — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:41:03 PST

In Directions in Music Cataloging, ten of the field’s top theoreticians and practitioners address the issues that are affecting the discovery and use of music in libraries today. Anyone who uses music in a library—be it a teacher, researcher, student, or casual amateur—relies on the work of music catalogers, and because these catalogers work with printed and recorded materials in a wide variety of formats, they have driven many innovations in providing access to library materials. As technology continues to transform the discovery and use of music, they are exploring ways to describe and provide access to music resources in a digital age. It is a time of flux in the field of music cataloging, and never has so much change come so quickly.

The roots of today’s issues lie in the past, and the first part of the volume opens with two articles by Richard P. Smiraglia that establish the context of modern music cataloging through research conducted in the early 1980s. The second part explores cataloging theory in its current state of transition, and the concluding part looks to the future by considering the application of emerging standards. The volume closes with a remembrance of A. Ralph Papakhian (1948–2010), the most prominent music cataloger of the past thirty years—a figure who initiated many of the developments covered in the volume and who served as a teacher and mentor for all of the contributors.

The Recorder: A Research and Information Guide

Richard Griscom et al. — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:39:10 PST

A Choice "Best Academic" book in its first edition, The Recorder remains an essential resource for anyone who wants to know about this instrument. This new edition is thoroughly redone, takes account of the publishing activity of the years since its first publication, and still follows the original organization.

Digital Audio in the Library

Richard Griscom — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:58:41 PDT

An incomplete draft of a book intended to serve as a guide and reference for librarians who are responsible for implementing digital audio services in their libraries.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Digital Audio Technology," covers the fundamentals of recorded sound and digital audio, including a description of digital audio formats, how digital audio is delivered to the listener, and how digital audio is created. Part 2, "Digital Audio in the Library," covers digitizing local collections, providing streaming audio reserves, and using digital audio to preserve analog recordings.

MLA-L at Twenty

Richard Griscom — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:33:53 PST

MLA-L, the electronic-mail distribution list for music librarians, is now twenty years old. Before the establishment of the list in 1989, professional communication among music librarians was paper based and slow. The growth of computer networks in the early 1980s led to the development of applications to promote group communication, including LISTSERV, an e-mail distribution application released in 1986. With the help of Mary Papakhian, a member of the information technology staff at Indiana University, Ralph Papakhian established MLA-L as the first distribution list on the university's LISTSERV server. Growth of the list was rapid: by the end of 1995, there were over 1,000 subscribers, and since then the number has slowly increased to over 1,100. The topics of discussion on MLA-L cover all aspects of the profession, and the archives of messages posted to the list provide a rich resource for the study of the history of music librarianship.

Periodical Use in a University Music Library: A Citation Study of Theses and Dissertations Submitted to the Indiana University School of Music from 1975-1980

Richard Griscom — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:12:25 PST

In an effort to measure in-house use of music periodicals, a citation study based on bibliographies in theses and dissertations was conducted at the Indiana University Music Library. A total of 256 titles were cited, but only 30% were cited more than once. While the periodical literature cited by musicologists has a low rate of obsolescence, the periodicals cited by theorists and educators becomes obsolete at a rapid rate, making the rate of obsolescence for the field as a whole, fairly high, unlike other subject areas in the humanities.

Publishing Undergraduate Research Electronically

Dennis DeTurck et al. — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:14:05 PDT

The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania has as a goal expanding opportunities for undergraduates to conduct significant research and promoting the products of this research. CUREJ, the College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, was developed in collaboration with the Penn Libraries to achieve this goal.

The Recorder: A Research and Information Guide

Richard Griscom et al. — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:10:38 PDT

An annotated bibliography of research on the recorder and its music. A Choice "Best Academic" book in its first edition (1994), The Recorder in its second edition is thoroughly redone. The revision takes account of the publishing activity of the years since its first publication, and still follows the original organization.

Music Librarianship at the Turn of the Century

Richard Griscom et al. — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:44:41 PDT

Fourteen authors explore the recent past, the present, and the future of music librarianship through an examination of topics of importance to the profession: collection development, preservation, cataloging, technology, copyright, reference, reference sources, user education, music publishing, sound recordings, the antiquarian music market, archives, and education for music librarianship. First published in the quarterly journal Notes, these essays reflect the views of today's professionals at the fin de siècle. The set of essays is framed by a foreword and afterword by editor Richard Griscom.

Content Recruitment and Development: A Proactive Approach to Building an Institutional Repository

Richard Griscom et al. — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:31:02 PDT

Describes the history of ScholarlyCommons@Penn and the service-oriented approach the staff have taken in recruiting participants and building content.

Distant Music: Delivering Audio over the Internet

Richard Griscom — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:31:00 PDT

Advances in audio technology in the 1980s and 1990s made it possible for librarians to create digital copies of sound recordings and to provide off-site access to them through streaming-media servers. Because streaming technology could accommodate heavy use at odd hours from any location, librarians quickly applied the new digital audio technologies to curricular listening assignments, providing a parallel to the print "e-reserves" projects developed by academic libraries during the 1990s. The results of a survey of thirty-nine digital audio reserves projects offers information on streaming formats, streaming rates, access control, user interfaces, staffing, equipment, and costs.