The legacy of the discographies: date of recording as authorized access point for sound recordings

Abstract

With the diffusion of sound reproduction media, the way of enjoying music changes and a new type of listener with specific needs arises. This type of listener, who could be labelled today as ‘discophile’, is interested in sound production and concerned with finding and exactly identifying the individual recordings contained in the support, in order to reconstruct the very session when the recording took place. The passion of such individuals led to the creation of discographic projects, works that list existing recordings, regardless of whether they have been released or not. Although they have been confined to a largely amateurish sphere, even today these projects are the only publications that can accurately provide data extracted from discographic research. With the circulation of LPs, the key to organizing the content becomes the recording date, considered the element capable of uniquely identifying a specific recording.     

This article questions the importance of this element in the Italian cataloguing tradition and offers an overview of the standards currently in use, also examining those published by IASA in 1999 for descriptive cataloguing and by RDA in 2010 for the creation of authority records. Since the recording date is an attribute of the expression, the focus is more on the tradition of the uniform title which has now been replaced by the title proper, thus preventing the possibility to elaborate an access point for the various expressions of the same work, which are instead the entities most frequently studied in the discography projects.      

The analysis conducted here, therefore, intends to encourage a reflection on the needs of a specific type of user who could potentially benefit from these data and at the same time it suggests a key to organising the existing sound heritage.