One Data Slice or Two?

It’s some months now since we agreed at our workshop that it might be possible to make  a comparison across libraries of a small sample of the legal deposit music acquired during the Georgian era.  A spreadsheet was shared and duly returned, or completed by me to the best of my ability where available data was more sketchy, and this month I’ve been pondering which data “slices” might be most amenable to comparison.

Here are the facts: a couple of libraries have identifiable runs of legal deposit music from that era.  Other libraries may have recognisable sequences, or scattered volumes containing legal deposit music, or volumes which were collated later along with other material NOT acquired by legal deposit.  The bindings, too, may be done to a house style, or may be so different that it’s clear the volumes arrived via a different route.

And then there are the catalogues.  Same problem.  The Universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen have their sequences of volumes, so the shelf-marks should be easy to recognise in the catalogues, too.  This may be the case in Glasgow and Oxford too, but it might not be as clear-cut as it is in St Andrews and Aberdeen.  Interrogating the catalogues for music from particular years will yield items that were NOT acquired by legal deposit as well as items that were.  And it’s even more complicated in some of the other libraries!  The vaster the collections, the trickier it gets.  There’s one more problem, too.  It’s not all catalogued online.  Where an online catalogue can be interrogated by date, a paper one cannot!

And then we have the problem that Kassler’s Music Entries at Stationers’ Hall 1710-1818 not only ends at 1818 – in other words, eighteen years before the Library Deposit Act in 1836 – but the last eighteen years of his index are listed as an appendix, and have a different history to the rest of the book: this appendix covers ‘Music entries from 1811 to 1818 in the William Hawes Manuscript’, which is an extract copied from the Stationers Hall registers.  It doesn’t give as much detail (notably, no publisher, not as much title information – and no library locations are given) but it does at least mean that we have a list of some kind up to 1818.

After that? We’re on our own!  Adam Matthew Digital has produced an online database providing digital images of the Stationers’ Hall registers, so it might be that we’d have to arrange for someone to transcribe the entries for the last eighteen years of the era that we’re interested in.

1. The first question is, do any of the Georgian legal deposit libraries subscribe to the Literary Print Culture database?
2. And the next is, can we find grant funding to make transcription a real possibility?!

Anyway, I’m wondering about not one but two data-slices, firstly at the tail-end of Kassler’s index – which would still mean we lacked some of the Stationers’ Hall data, but would include the most library stock – and then, perhaps later on, to consider the five or six years prior to the Copyright Rescinding Act. This would allow us to make comparisons between what was published, by whom, and whether different kinds of material were by now being kept.

Before any kind of listing could be made, we have to decide what style of bibliography we’re aspiring to.  Do we want it online?  Do we want short-titles or full descriptive bibliography?  What skills do we require in a research assistant for this kind of task? Certainly, we need an understanding of music AND of what cataloguing or bibliography-making entails.

We’ll all need to mull over these problems before we can make any positive plans of action!