Re: jewish music databases

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

Dear Roger:

Your problem is one continually confronted by libraries cataloging Jewish 
music. The best on-line world data base for music is OCLC, yet they still 
haven't developed use of Hebrew fonts. Every Hebrew and Yiddish title must be 
"romanized" according to standard Library of Congress procedure. This is an 
arcane task--particularly to those of us without a strong knowledge of modern 
Hebrew grammar. Also, be informed that LC's romanization scheme is different 
from YIVO's.

I confront this problem continually when I have to catalog scores of Jewish 
liturgical music. Our local Aleph system supports Hebrew fonts, but OCLC, on 
which I always catalog to provide world access, does not.

In my 6+ years experience of cataloging Jewish music manuscripts, and that's 
everything from nineteenth-century cantors books with Hebrew characters under 
the notes to late twentieth-century works for the Reform synagogue, I would 
seriously advise you--if you have the liberty of creating your own system--use 
only Hebrew characters. Otherwise, every time you look up a piece by its title, 
you would be confronted by the numerous spellings of the numerous places where 
Jews have lived--not too mention the Sephardit vs. Ashkenaz way of pronouncing 
the "kometz" vowel. 

Here are a few of the spellings I have found for Veshamru:

Weshamru,   W'shomru, W'shomeru, Veshamru, V'shomru, Veshomeru, W'somru 
(Romanian).

Then there's Unasaneh tokef,  Unataneh tokef ...

Anyway, you get the idea.

Eliott Kahn


At 01:12 PM 1/25/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Not about music but about keeping track of and finding it:
>
>I've started cataloging my Hasidic records in an Access (ptui ptui ptui)
>database.  What I'd really like to do tho is also catalog the tunes
>themselves.
>
>A problem is inconsistant transliteration.  For example, I probably
>have a dozen different version of Lecha Dodi  or L'Cha Doidi or Lechah
>Doideh.
>
>The best solution to my mind is to enter tune names in the character
>set appropriate for the language; eg to enter Lecha Dodi in Hebrew.
>Ignoring vowel points, all the above would spell identically.
>
>I see that the Freedman Collection at the U of P seems to be able
>to do that.  My database experience in Sybase is vast, in Access
>not so vast, but in either case having diffferent languages and
>character sets for different fields is not something the DBMS
>makes particularly simple.
>
>Has anyone in this list tried such a thing?  I tried contacting
>the people who worked on the Freedman Collection but didn't hear
>from them.
>
>roger
>
>-- 
>r l reid        ro (at) panix(dot)com
>

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