Describing Music Materials: A Manual for Resource Description of Printed and Recorded Music and Music Videos by Richard P. Smiraglia (review)

The fifteen-month period preceding the writing of this review has been a watershed for music catalogers seeking vocational guidance in long form. During that period, there appeared not one but two monographic publications about bibliographic description and access for music: the book by Richard P. Smiraglia that is the subject of this review, and one by Jean Harden, music cataloging librarian at the University of North Texas (Jean Harden, Music Description and Access: Solving the Puzzle of Cataloging, Music Library Association Technical Reports, no. 34 [Middleton, WI: A-R Editions; Music Library Association, 2018]). Lamentably, a full, comparative analysis of the two works is beyond the scope of this review, but suffice it to say, both texts are a welcome sight to practitioners in a field that has experienced constant change in recent years.

Jihee Beak joined Smiraglia for this fourth edition of a text whose genesis goes back thirty-four years; its earliest progenitor appeared under the title Cataloging Music: A Manual for Use with AACR2(Lake Crystal, MN: Soldier Creek Press, 1983). To say that the norms of music cataloging have changed during this period would be a gross understatement. The greatest change was the replacement of Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd ed. (AACR2) with Resource Description and Access(RDA), the library cataloging standard first published in 2010 and widely implemented in 2013. Music resources collected by libraries also evolved: LP records largely gave way to compact discs, and later, to streaming media; reference sources once limited to print volumes were joined (or supplanted) by formidable and evergrowing counterparts on the Web.

In response to these changes, Smiraglia and Beak altered the content and formatting of the text from its previous editions. In addition to reframing the content to align with RDA practices, the abundant examples now include a description of how to catalog a streaming audio resource. The authors also reworked the formerly lengthy bibliography, which now describes a much smaller set of representative resources (many of them online) in the introduction. This seems appropriate, given that the constellation of reference sources needed by the working music cataloger is constantly growing and changing. Unfortunately, due to the unstable nature of Web resources and the lengthy book publication cycle, several of these references are already out of date—for example, the links listed on page xvi to the Grammophon Web archive (whose URL is broken as of 26 January 2018) and on page xvii to a Web site maintained by the Music Library Association (MLA), "Thematic Indexes Used in the Library of Congress/NACO Authority File" (whose URL points to a superseded version of the resource). It would have been more useful if this section of the book had pointed to a reliable Web site that included up-to-date links to music-cataloging resources.

Additionally, references to the RDA online text, as well as to its companion policy statements issued by the Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements(LC-PCC PS) and MLA's Best Practices using RDA and MARC21(MLA BP), are current as of 15 December 2015 (p. xxi). As nearly a year elapsed before this manual was published (and over two years before writing this review), some of those references will no doubt be obsolete, since the creators of LC-PPC PS and MLA BP issue updates multiple times per year. Highlighting this fact, however, is not so much a criticism of the authors as an acknowledgment of the unfortunate difficulty of setting in print practical occupational knowledge that evolves at a rapid pace.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned editorial and intellectual adaptations, and with appropriate caveats to the reader regarding the vagaries of Web content, this text is on the whole sufficiently detailed, readable, and succinct...