Foundations in Music Bibliography

As more and more music literature is published each year, librarians, scholars, and bibliographers are turning to music bibliography to retain control over the flood of information. Based on the Conference of Music Bibliography, this timely book provides vital information on the most important aspects of the scholarly practice of music bibliography. Foundations in Music Bibliography provides librarians with great insight into bibliographic issues they face every day including bibliographic control of primary and secondary sources, the emergence of enumerative and analytical bibliography, bibliographic instruction, and bibliographic lacunae.

Foundations in Music Bibliography features the perspectives of prominent scholars and music librarians on contemporary issues in music bibliography often encountered by music librarians. It offers practical insights and includes chapters on teaching students how to use microcomputer programs to search music bibliographies, organizing a graduate course in music bibliography, and researching film music bibliography. The book also provides a supplement to Steven D. Westcott’s A Comprehensive Bibliography of Music for Film and Television. This insightful volume demonstrates the many ways that bibliography relates music publications to each other and endows grander meaning to individual scholarly observations. Some of the fascinating topics covered by Foundations in Music Bibliography include:

the history of thematic catalogs

indexing Gregorian chant manuscripts

general principles of bibliographic instruction

analyses of Debussy

discographies

musical ephemera and their importance in various types of musicological research

bibliographical lacunae (i.e. lack of access to visual sources, failure to control primary sources, and lack of communication with the rest of the performing arts)

Foundations in Music Bibliography shows librarians how bibliography can be used to help music students and researchers find the information they need among the innumerable available sources. It is an indispensable asset to the shelves of all music reference libraries that wish to provide their patrons with the latest bibliographic tools.