New in Library: Be Your Own Manager: a Career Handbook for Classical Musicians

We've just catalogued our first book on the new library system!  (You have no idea the fun we had getting to the point where you could see the results of our cataloguing work.)

Be your own manager a career handbook for classical musicians, by Bernhard Kerres and Bettina Mehne (London Tenaia Management Ltd, 2017)

Production Line (courtesy of Pixabay)

See it in the library catalogue, here.  Now for the next one ...

What Goes on in a Music Cataloguer's Head?

This week, the library was gifted a copy of The Scottish Orpheus edited by Adam Hamilton.  As with any donations, the first question we ask, is whether we've already got it?  We have - but not this edition.  We hadn't even heard of the editor, Adam Hamilton before! Not a problem - David Baptie's Musical Scotland dictionary usually comes up trumps, and it did again today:- 

Hamilton first published his The Scottish Orpheus around 1865 - it was published in Edinburgh by "Hamilton & Müller".  By the turn of the century (around 1897), it was being published in Edinburgh and London by Paterson - and that's the edition we've just been gifted.  It looks a competent collection.  There are no editorial notes ("paratext"), just a title-page and a contents page, and unlike some other collections of this era, there's no sol-fa, just normal music notation.

By 1922 it was published with the intention of being in in more than one volume, by J. Michael Diack - we already have Vol.1.  The contents are a little different, and Diack's edition contains a few more Scotticisms in the text.  It has also gone down from 215 to 159 pages, probably because he intended to publish a subsequent volume.

But that's not the end of the story.  There's no trace of a Scottish Orpheus vol.2, but Diack went on to publish a New Scottish Orpheus in three volumes, ca.1922-1937.   It must have been a commercially viable product - or at least, certainly worth keeping the title and updating the contents and arrangements!

Meanwhile, our new gift has been catalogued (and all the contents indexed, titles and first lines and all - phew!) and it'll go in our Special Collections.

Our catalogue system will be changing in July 2017. Until then, you can see the catalogue entry for Hamilton's Scottish Orpheus here.  (We'll post the link to the new catalogue nearer the time.)

Something Old, Something New ... New in the Whittaker Library today

Today's cataloguing has included recent CDs contributed by Conservatoire colleagues, and the tail end of a batch of recorder music that we inherited from a local school. Very varied indeed!  To see what we've added to stock, just click here.  (It also gives you an idea of the varied performance repertoires of our teaching colleagues ... reminding us that they have lives as performers "out there", as well as respected instrumental teachers in the RCS.)

(Don't ask about the odd characters in the wordcloud - they don't appear in the catalogue!)

What do Librarians Do While Students are Away?

Summertime in the Library

We catch up!  The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Whittaker Library has been adding more of the David Nicholson flute music bequest to stock*, not to mention ...

• Cataloguing books and policy documents that came our way, 
• Replacing lost materials, 
• Authoring podcasts about our services, 
• Planning training sessions for staff and students ...
• And of course we're still here for students who're not on vacation, and our academic and support staff colleagues!

Don't forget, you can always check the latest additions to stock by visiting THIS LINK.  (It's at the bottom of the catalogue homepage, by the way). 


*  The best music title award last week went to this little gem from the David Nicholson bequest:- 

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In the Water, by Robert Beaser.  (No kidding!  It sparked off something of a contest between the Whittaker Library and our opposite numbers at the RNCM.  Watch this space for more gems!)

Flute Donation - A Day in the Life of a Music Librarian

We have this fabulous, big donation of flute music.  First the music has to be catalogued.  To do that, we have to search for catalogue records then edit them to suit our purposes.

Spot the difference.  This represents a day in the life of a music librarian!

 

Music Librarian Cataloguing Nerd

I got ridiculously excited about this - the Library of Congress classification schedules as a PDF, online!  Very useful indeed.

Music and Music books  (M, ML, MT)

The Musical Library

Endless cataloguing?

'Whittaker' is cataloguing three volumes of a four-volume Victorian vocal series.  The contents are endless.  Seriously, endless ...  I'd be losing the will to live, if it wasn't for the thought that there are interesting things in here, and someone might appreciate them.  So it's my duty to let you know we have it - and what's inside.