Re: jewish music databases

[Eliott Kahn <Elkahn...>]

At 06:55 PM 1/25/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Eliott, could you enlighten us as to the LC's transliteration scheme?
>Thanks,
>Lorele

Well, a lot has been said and I'd like to address a few issues as briefly as 
possible. They don't pay me a salary here to kibitz.

Lori, LC publishes a pamphlet HEBRAICA CATALOGING: A GUIDE TO ALA/LC 
ROMANIZATION, 1987. It can be purchased through their website, which I believe 
is LOC.GOV

That said, there are 3 pp. of romanization tables that I often use and would be 
happy to fax them to you. Please respond off-line. A part of the summary for 
the scheme reads as follows: "In 1976 inferior dots [that means below the 
letter] were added to the "v" and "t" in order to distinguish vet from vav 
[with inferior dot], and tav from tet [inferior dot]; the miagkii znak [which 
is delicious au jus, by the way] or prime (' ) for aleph was changed to alif 
('); the acute was added to the "s" to distinguish samekh (s) from sin ('s ), 
and the grave was added to the "s" in romanized  Yiddish to distinguish the sav 
(s') from samekh (s) and sin (s'). [Please excuse diacritics; I have few 
choices on my keyboard].

As I told Geraldine when she visited, music librarianship--like everything else 
in life--is a finesse job that involves knowledge, discipline, and experience. 
I say this not to keep people out of the field but to invite them in and ask 
them to at least accept with humility that they may have a lot to learn.
We are very fortunate that librarians have been at this game quite a while and 
have over the years devised a system accepted--I believe--in most 
English-speaking domains. It is called Anglo-American cataloging rules, or AACR 
II, since its latest edition in 1988. In addition to AACR II, we all have 
publications continually updated from the Library of Congress and the Music 
Library Association.

RE: Joel Bresler's astute comment on multiple titles: AACR has long had a 
provision to tackle this problem. They are called uniform titles. Uniform 
titles are universally accepted titles for a piece or work of music (or 
literature, etc.) that could easily have several. For instance, The Song of 
Songs could be referred to by that title or Shir ha-Shirim, Hohelied, Das Lied 
der Lieder, Canticle of Canticles, etc. The uniform title is something like: 
Bible. O.T. Song of Solomon. This uniform title is accepted and posted by the 
Library of Congress, and accepted by all participating AACRII 
institutions--most of the academic libraries in the U.S. It's a slow, tedious 
process, agreeing on these matters and many more, but such is the nature of 
developing and maintaining standards.

Obviously, the world of Jewish music is a fairly esoteric field to many 
academic and public libraries, and one will never find an adequate 
representation of our world there. But this may a blessing in some ways, in 
that those of you who are experts in this field can band together with other 
experts in the field and agree on some universally accepted standard for 
yourselves. I would suggest Joel and other Sephardic specialists on the list 
correspond re: mutually acceptable titles for many of these tunes and agree to 
use them--either in Latin or Hebrew characters, or both.

RE: The Keynote system: Geraldine, I still don't understand how your database 
can recognize variant titles as the same one. Could you explain this a bit 
further. Does it work by speech recognition? I have used a typed-consonant 
system researching at the U.S. Archives and found it cumbersome.

I am also unclear (and skeptical) that your keynote system can eventually be 
upgraded and made a part of the OCLC on-line data base. As I have written 
above, this is a system heavy with accepted standards RE: titles, authors, 
subject headings--not to mention each of those variable fields where the item 
needs to be physically described, dated, given a call number, etc.

Eliott


Dr. Eliott Kahn
Music Archivist
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
3080 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
WK: (212) 678-8076
FAX (212) 678-8998
elkahn (at) jtsa(dot)edu

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