Below is a spreadsheet and additional information related to the Wingra Wind Quintet Library which was the product of an independent study I engaged in during my third year of undergraduate studies at UW-Madison. The focus of the project was on cataloging, handling of special materials, and independent work. The Wingra Wind Quintet is the faculty wind quintet at UW-Madison.

Background

One day, during a flute lesson, I happened to ask my professor (Dr. Conor Nelson) about the large shelf of archival boxes labelled with letters sitting in his office. He told me then, that those boxes housed the Wingra Wind Quintet’s music library (the wingra wind quintet is the faculty wind quintet at UW-Madison). I asked more, and to my surprise, he informed me that the library was sitting largely unused because it had not been cataloged or even looked-through in some time. This piqued my interest and I decided that I was in a good position to do something about it. From there, I proposed and received approval for an independent study throughout the spring semester of 2024 supervised by Professor Dorothea Salo to catalog this collection of music so that it could actually be used by the quintet and other chamber ensembles. 

Process

This project included four main stages–the last of which is still in progress. The first stage was basic assessment: I wanted to understand what this small library contained. From this, I learned that the materials included printed music, manuscripts, tapes, ephemera (i.e. letters), and more. In the second stage of catalog design: I used the information gathered from basic assessment along with resources from the Library of Congress, books on special collections, and RDA standards to design my own catalog and set of standards. The third and longest stage was physical cataloging, which meant going through each box and the 40-50 folders of music in said box to catalog each individual item from title to dimensions. The fourth stage, and the one currently in progress, is catalog cleaning and presentation. After the cataloging was complete, I began iteratively editing and cleaning the library to apply consistent naming conventions, standardize measurements, fill in composer/arranger dates, and more. I am still working on adding materials to this catalog–as I have recently gotten materials back from members of the quintet. Additionally, once this data has been sufficiently cleaned and standardized, my intention is to build an SQL database for this data to further improve searchability and data integrity. In the future, when rehousing of the collection is possible, the collection should be physically reorganized. That said, the current form of the catalog is a spreadsheet whose digital organization mirrors the physical organization of the collection. While simple, this was decided upon because it is accessible, affordable, and usable by individuals with no database experience (given the current state of the library). Looking forward, in the future I hope to remove certain materials from the collection so that they may be added to archives in the Mills Music Library and to rehouse the collection entirely.