Conference Agenda

The war in Ukraine has renewed attention to the historical conflation of Ukrainian and neighboring cultures with Russian identity. The long shadow of Russification has persisted under Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and continues to the present day. This erasure persists in library and archival metadata, limiting the visibility of musical traditions from Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and Uyghur communities.

This presentation explores how Soviet censorship and Russian-language mandates obscured minority identities and how these patterns of bias persist in library metadata. These patterns are sustained by a cyclical relationship in which metadata both shapes and is shaped by scholarship and reference resources, including Grove, RILM, and MGG. Linked data platforms such as VIAF and Wikidata further propagate these issues, as VIAF aggregates authority data primarily from Western national libraries while excluding authority data from former Soviet countries like Armenia and Belarus, both of which have robust online authority files.

Cultural erasure is best mitigated by practices that prioritize community-centered representation. These include updating metadata with native languages and scripts, using controlled vocabularies that reflect local terminology, and enhancing archival descriptions to improve discoverability, particularly for native-language users. The importance of collaboration with scholars and publishers is evident in Grove Music Online’s recent Ukrainian music revision project. These practices can serve as a model for preserving excluded traditions. By applying reparative cataloging methods and fostering cultural sensitivity, librarians can promote authentic representation, counter historical oppression, and ensure musical heritages are accurately reflected in library collections.

This presentation will introduce the idea of the bibliographic record as a genre and will use concepts from genre theory to explore the genre’s current condition as it exists in the United States. As its authors, catalogers recognize catalog users as the genre’s readers, doing so explicitly when discussing issues like the specialized needs of users seeking music information or FRBR or LRM user tasks. In addition to authors and readers, the bibliographic record has generic qualities like social and place/time contexts, discourse communities, generic evolution, and the potential for dysfunction. This presentation will explore some of the generic qualities and functions of the American bibliographic record, with particular focus on records for music materials. It will offer suggestions for ways its authors might use pragmatic approaches to writing its texts and engage with tensions in its discourse communities, and will seek to spark a conversation on ways that discourse communities of catalogers outside the United States navigate generic evolution effectively.

Franco Margola (1903–1990), among the foremost representatives of Italian Neoclassicism after the “Generazione Ottanta,” left an extensive corpus of nearly 800 compositions, catalogued by Ottavio De Carli in 1993, of which about 60% remains unpublished and preserved in manuscript form. The Margola Archive, housed in the Library of the “Luca Marenzio” Conservatory in Brescia, contains the entire collection entrusted by the composer’s family and constitutes a crucial resource for musicological investigation. A preliminary examination of the archive reveals the complexity of Margola’s creative process, characterized by irregular working methods, extensive preparatory sketches, multiple drafts, long-term revisions, and gaps due to lost or dispersed works. Additional materials not included in the 1993 catalogue have also emerged, together with new information drawn from archival documents, recordings, and family testimonies. This study seeks to provide an updated overview of Margola’s output by identifying the quantitative distribution of unpublished works and classifying them according to instrumentation, form, and typology. Special attention is given to fragments, incomplete compositions, dispersed sources, and elements essential for the critical reconstruction of the catalogue.The aims of the research are twofold: first, to establish the foundations for a systematic revision and expansion of Margola’s catalogue; second, to promote scholarly valorization through the preparation of critical editions, with particular focus on lesser-known repertories such as guitar works and chamber music. Ultimately, this work contributes to restoring full visibility to a key figure of twentieth-century Italian music and to exploring a substantial yet still largely unknown portion of his oeuvre.