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ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 40 | August 1999


NLA at work

Music cataloguing marches on

It is estimated that the Library’s music collection contains about 168 000 pieces of music, with about 90 000 of these items composed, arranged, transcribed or having lyrics by Australians.

In the period 1985 to 1998, control over the music collections rose from 7 to to 70 per cent, with a small group of cataloguers dedicated to the task of cataloguing all current acquisitions while at the same time tackling uncatalogued music in the collection. This has been an admirable effort but large categories of material still need treatment. In late 1998 the Library put out a Request for Tender to catalogue some of this retrospective material. The contract commenced in December 1998, and is now complete. Over 8200 titles have been catalogued or have had their holdings added to the NBD.

The completion of this project means that all Australian piano, string and choral music in the Library’s collection is now available through both the NBD and the Library’s OPAC catalogue.

Additionally, a number of important formed collections were catalogued. These include the Fitzmaurice Collection of 914 piano marches and the Lewis Collection (over 2000 items of dance music collected by dance band leader Reg Lewis and his performer wife, Barbara James). The project also included cataloguing of over 1000 overseas imprints in the piano music genre.

These records and holdings are a welcome addition to the almost 58 000 music records already available in the Library’s OPAC.


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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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