The Music Thesaurus: Function and Foundations

Abstract

In her recent article, American Music Libraries and Librarianship: challenges for the Nineties, Mary Wallace Davidson's discussion of focused on the notion of contextual searching. Indeed, contextual searching helps users cope with too much as well as too little information retrieved.(1) However, terms in most standard subject heading lists are arranged alphabetically rather than conceptually. Given the obvious limitations of such an alphabetical sequence, keyword searching has emerged as the most sophisticated form of conjoining like concepts. But keyword searching does not easily, if ever, bring together concepts or broad categories that are inherent to the structure of a thesaurus. For example, categories such as liturgical sacred vocal forms, instrumental forms, or topical songs are built into the music thesaurus. These and similar broad categories are commonly sought but are almost impossible to retrieve by keyword searching. Keyword searching is like shining a flashlight into the black hole of information: searchers see only the spot on which their light shines. By contrast, contextual searching illuminates not only exact concepts but also the environment surrounding those concepts. Contextual searching allows searchers to evaluate how they search and what they find in relation to what they want and what is available. The full benefit of contextual searching in the discipline of music depends, however, on the availability of a comprehensive music thesaurus--a work currently in progress, the foundations of which are discussed briefly here. The actual development of a music thesaurus may have caught some of us by surprise, but the ideas represented in this project have long been in the minds and writings of music librarians and other scholars. Since the turn of the century, the Library of Congress has attempted to provide subject headings for the vast variety of materials in its collection. Perhaps it is both in spite of and because of this valiant effort that specialists have recognized the need for more specific subject access to individual disciplines than LC has been able to supply. As early as 1933, music librarians attempted to standardize their indexing vocabulary by issuing a provisional list of subject headings based on the music card catalogues of the Library of Congress.(2) Two years later, the Music Library Association issued another list, this one containing subject headings for the literature of music used in the dictionary catalogues of LC.(3) Once the lists were distributed, complaints followed. In a 1948 Notes article, Helen E. bush and David Judson Haykin stated that neither of these lists was found both acceptable and adequate.(4) The primary complaint was the lack of form headings in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to represent musical works. The authors expressed two fundamental concerns about subject headings: the user's approach and the language of the heading. The user's approach to a subject was described in terms of specificity, ranging from relative to exact. The authors suggested that closely connected to the user's approach should be the language of the heading and the cross-references it provided: It helps to bring related headings together and thus indicates to the reader how he may broaden his search in the catalog.(5) Such was the insight of our forerunners! What they were proposing almost fifty years ago: 1. a standard vocabulary for the discipline of music 2. a hierarchical arrangement of that vocabulary 3. a faceted terminology 4. a rich lead-in vocabulary 5. a complete syndetic structure is what we are presenting today as the foundation for the music thesaurus. STANDARD VOCABULARY The vocabulary of music is as diverse as the discipline and its participants. One might well question how it is possible to collect and maintain an exhaustive set of terminology for any subject. …