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.

The paper presents the first results of the project to develop a specialized Faceted Thesaurus of Musical Genres and Forms in accordance with ISO standards and the Italian Nuovo Soggettario methodology. The Thesaurus is organized in a hierarchical structure, with a thoroughly faceted and synthetically list of terms, which have a cross-language equivalence relationship with other Thesauri and it is designed to function as a semantic hub, supporting integrated research in library catalogues and Linked Data Environments. Furthermore, the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) will also be tested to optimize indexing and semantic enrichment. A case study is presented which describes how the Thesaurus could improve user Information Retrieval and serve as infrastructure of the research.